Radiation-Hardened, Read-Disturbance-Free New-Quatro-10T Memory Cell for Aerospace Applications

Soft error protection is a paramount requirement for memories exposed to radiation environment. To satisfy the demand, a radiation-hardened new-quatro 10T memory cell is proposed in this brief, which is immune to single-node upset and also has high resilience to multinode upset while features read-disturbance-free benefiting from its internal quad-node interlocked feedback mechanism. Simulation results show that it provides ample radiation robustness to single event and gives 1.75x improvements in multinode upset tolerance when compared with the previous 12T dual-interlocked storage cell (DICE-12T) bitcell, signifying the higher fault tolerance capability. In addition, the proposed design also achieves 6.48x enhancement in read noise margin when compared with the DICE-12T bitcell while compromising only 2.1x larger area than a reference 6T cell based on a 65-nm logic design rule, exhibiting the superiority in read stability.