Voltage Bootstrapped Schmitt Trigger based Radiation Hardened Latch Design for Reliable Circuits

Abstract

Soft error is one of the major reliability issue with technology scaling. In this work, we propose a radiation hardened voltage bootstrapped schmitt trigger (VB-ST) latch. To evaluate the circuit radiation resilience, we calculated the critical charge under the PVT variations at the most sensitive node and observed that the proposed latch has the highest critical charge and the lowest soft error rate ratio when compared to existing latches. We analyzed the impact of process variations on our design and observed that the VB-ST latch has 0.42x less critical voltage variability as compared to ST latch. Further, dynamic power and propagation delay are examined for various supply voltages, and we observed that the VB-ST latch has the lowest power consumption and delay propagation when compared to the other considered latches. For the validation of the proposed latch, a charge to power-delay-area product ratio (QPAR) is calculated and we clearly observed that the proposed VB-ST based latch significantly outperforms the performance of existing designs. © 2021 ACM.