A Robust Hardened Latch Featuring Tolerance to Double-Node-Upset in 28nm CMOS for Spaceborne Application

Soft errors induced by high energy particles have been a severe concern in integrated circuits. Especially in advanced nanoscale technology nodes, the phenomenon of multi-node-upset caused by charge sharing is becoming a crucial issue. However, this problem remains a challenge as there are only few mitigation methods. This brief demonstrates a cost-efficient latch named CROUT featuring double-node-upset tolerance. Integrating coupled Schmitt-triggers and four always-on high-threshold transistors, CROUT is highly reliable in the presence of double-node-upset. To further validate this, a test chip was fabricated in the 28nm CMOS process and tested in a heavy-ion radiation environment. The experimental results indicated that the radiation tolerance is about 2x higher than the standard latches. Moreover, compared to other state-of-the-art multi-node-upset tolerant latches, its power-delay-product (PDP) is reduced by similar to 6x. The results show that our proposed latch is highly reliable and cost-effective for the space application, which further can be made into a standard cell to be integrated into large-scale circuits.