Low cost and highly reliable hardened latch design for nanoscale CMOS technology

With technology node shrinking, the susceptibility of a single chip to soft errors increases. Hence, the critical charge (Qcrit) of circuit decreases and this decrease is expected to continue with further technology scaling. In this paper previous hardened latch circuits are analyzed and it is found that previous designs offer limited protection against soft error especially for soft error caused by high energy particles and not all the nodes are under soft error protection. Therefore, in this paper we propose a low cost hardened latch design in 45 nm CMOS technology with full protection for all internal nodes as well as output node against soft error. Moreover, the proposed hardened approach is technology independent. Compared to previous hardened latch designs, the proposed design reduces cost in terms of power delay product (PDP) 59% on average. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.