An advanced SEU tolerant latch based on error detection

This paper proposes a latch that can mitigate SEUs via an error detection circuit.The error detection circuit is hardened by a C-element and a stacked PMOS.In the hold state,a particle strikes the latch or the error detection circuit may cause a fault logic state of the circuit.The error detection circuit can detect the upset node in the latch and the fault output will be corrected.The upset node in the error detection circuit can be corrected by the Celement.The power dissipation and propagation delay of the proposed latch are analyzed by HSPICE simulations.The proposed latch consumes about 77.5％ less energy and 33.1％ less propagation delay than the triple modular redundancy (TMR) latch.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed latch can mitigate SEU effectively.     

Low-power clock-less hardware implementation of the rijndael S-box for wireless sensor networks

The recent development of microelectronics techniques and advances in wireless communications have made it feasible to design low-cost, low-power, multifunctional and intelligent sensor nodes for wireless sensor networks (WSN). The design challenges for an efficient WSN mainly lie in two issues power and security. The Rijindael algorithm is a candidate algorithm for encrypting data in WSN. The SubByte (S-box) transformation is the main building block of the Rijindael algorithm. It dominates the hardware complexity and power consumption of the Rijindael cryptographic engine. This article proposes a clock-less hardware implementation of the S-box. In this S-box, 1) The composite field arithmetic in GF((24))2 was used to implement the compact datapath circuit; 2) A high-efficiency latch controller was attained by utilizing the four-phase micropipeline. The presented hardware circuit is an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) on 0.25 μm complementary mental oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process using three metal layers. The layout simulation results show that the proposed S-box offers low-power consumption and high speed with moderate area penalty. This study also proves that the clock-less design methodology can implement high- performance cryptographic intellectual property (IP) core for the wireless sensor node chips.     

使用GaAs MMIC技术的X波段微波频率检测器

The design, fabrication, and experimental results of an MEMS microwave frequency detector are presented for the first time. The structure consists of a microwave power divider, two CPW transmission lines, a microwave power combiner, an MEMS capacitive power sensor and a thermopile. The detector has been designed and fabricated on GaAs substrate using the MMIC process at the X-band successfully. The MEMS capacitive power sensor is used for detecting the high power signal, while the thermopile is used for detecting the low power signal. Signals of 17 and 10 dBm are measured over the X-band. The sensitivity is 0.56 MHz/fF under 17 dBm by the capacitive power sensor, and 6.67 MHz / μV under 10 dBm by the thermopile, respectively. The validity of the presented design has been confirmed by the experiment.     

CMOS工艺下基于ΣΔ调制的4 GHz比特流乘法器设计

An integrated circuit design of a high speed multiplier for direct sigma-delta modulated bit-stream signals is presented. Compared with conventional structures, this multiplier reduces the circuit-loop delay of its sub-modules and works efficiently at a high speed. The multiplier＇s stability has also been improved with source coupled logic technology. The chip is fabricated in a TSMC 0.18-μm CMOS process. The test results demonstrate that the chip realizes the multiplication function and exhibits an excellent performance. It can work at 4 GHz and the voltage output amplitude reaches the designed maximum value with no error bit caused by logic race-and-hazard. Additionally, the analysis of the multiplier＇s noise performance is also presented.     

Synchronous derived clock and synthesis of low power sequential circuits

Based on analyzing significance of controlling clock in design of low power sequential circuits, this paper proposes a technique that the gating signal is derived from the master latch in a flip-flop to make the derived clock having no glitch and no skew. The design of a decimal counter with half-frequency division shows that by using the synchronous derived clock the counter has lower power dissipation as well as simpler combinational logic. Computer simulation shows 20% power saving.     

A low-power DCO using inverter interlaced cascaded delay cell

This paper presents a low-power small-area digitally controlled oscillator(DCO) using an inverters interlaced cascaded delay cell(IICDC).It uses a coarse-fine architecture with binary-weighted delay stages for the delay range and resolution.The coarse-tuning stage of the DCO uses IICDC,which is power and area efficient with low phase noise,as compared with conventional delay cells.The ADPLL with a DCO is fabricated in the UMC 180-nm CMOS process with an active area of 0.071 mm2.The output frequency range is 140–600 MHz at the power supply of 1.8 V.The power consumption is 2.34 m W @ a 200 MHz output.     

ANALOG CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION OF NEURAL NETWORK WITH HIGH PRECISION WEIGHTS

A current-mode MOS neuron circuit with 4-bit programmable weights is presented by using CMOS technology. The weights of the neurcn have high resolution and also can easily be digitally stored. The resolution can be extended into high levels such as 8-bit, etc. by the design methodology presented in this paper. The operational principle of the neuron is discussed. Circuit simulation has been made by use of SPICE II. The results give a good agreement for the design requirements.     

An efficient implementation architecture for wide-band digital downconversion

The wide-band digital receiving systems require digital downconversion(DDC) with high data rate and short tuning time in order to intercept the narrow-band signals within broad tuning bandwidth. But these requirements can not be met by the commercial DDC. In this paper an efficient implementation architecture is presented. It combines the flexibility of DFT tuning with the efficiency of the polyphase filter bank decomposition. By first decimating the data prior to filtering and mixing, this architecture gives a better solution to the mismatch between the lower hardware speed and high data rate. The computer simulations show the feasibility of this processing architecture.     

An 8 bit 1 MS/s SAR ADC with 7.72-ENOB

This paper presents a low power 8-bit 1 MS/s SAR ADC with 7.72-bit ENOB. Without an op-amp, an improved segmented capacitor DAC is proposed to reduce the capacitance and the chip area. A dynamic latch comparator with output offset voltage storage technology is used to improve the precision. Adding an extra positive feedback in the latch is to increase the speed. What is more, two pairs of CMOS switches are utilized to eliminate the kickback noise introduced by the latch. The proposed SAR ADC was fabricated in SMIC 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The measured results show that this design achieves an SFDR of 61.8 dB and an ENOB of 7.72 bits, and it consumes 67.5 μ W with the FOM of 312 fJ/conversion-step at 1 MS/s sample under 1.8 V power supply.     

Dual-Voltage Single-Rail Dynamic DPA-Resistant Logic Based on Charge Sharing Mechanism

Differential power analysis (DPA) has become a major system security concern.To achieve high levels of security with low power and die area costs,a novel Dual-voltage single-rail dynamic logic (DSDL) design is proposed.The proposed scheme can reduce power dissipation and obtain extremely well-balanced power consumption.The charge sharing mechanism is used for voltage transfer in the internal nodes during the evaluation of the design.Dual power supply voltages are used with positive feedback to speed up the evaluation process.A 4-bit micro Substitution box (SBOX) of the Advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm has been implemented to verify the security of the proposed logic design.The experimental results proved the security and the efficiency of the proposed DSDL,which can reduce power dissipation by up to 20％ and occupies at most 83％ of the silicon area when compared with previous state-of-the-art countermeasures.     

A novel radiation hardened by design latch

Due to aggressive technology scaling, radiation-induced soft errors have become a serious reliability concern in VLSI chip design. This paper presents a novel radiation hardened by design latch with high single-event-upset (SEU) immunity. The proposed latch can effectively mitigate SEU by internal dual interlocked scheme. The propagation delay, power dissipation and power delay product of the presented latch are evaluated by detailed SPICE simulations. Compared with previous SEU-hardening solutions such as TMR-Latch, the presented latch is more area efficient, delay and power efficient. Fault injection simulations also demonstrate the robustness of the presented latch even under high energy particle strikes.     

High performance energy efficient radiation hardened latch for low voltage applications

Energy efficiency is considered to be the most critical design parameter for IoT and other ultra low power applications. However, energy efficient circuits show a lesser immunity against soft error, because of the smaller device node capacitances in nanoscale technologies and near-threshold voltage operation. Due to these reasons, the tolerance of the sequential circuits to SEUs is an important consideration in nanoscale near threshold CMOS design. This paper presents an energy efficient SEU tolerant latch. The proposed latch improves the SEU tolerance by using a clocked Muller- C and memory elements based restorer circuit. The parasitic extracted simulations using STMicroelectronics 65 nm CMOS technology show that by employing the proposed latch, an average improvement of ∼40% in energy delay product (EDP), is obtained over the recently reported latch. Moreover, the proposed latch is also validated in a TCAD calibrated PTM 32 nm framework and PTM 22 nm CMOS technology nodes. In 32 nm and 22 nm technologies, the proposed latch improves the EDP ∼12% and 59% over existing latches respectively.     

Radiation Hardened by Design Latches — A Review and SEU Fault Simulations

There are many Radiation Hardened by Design (RHBD) architectures presented in the literature to mitigate Single Event Upset (SEU) in a storage element, a latch. Nevertheless, the design of a SEU hardened latch is being continuously improved with respect to reliability, performance, power consumption and area overhead. SEU mitigating techniques by design focus on reducing criticality of sensitive nodes in a latch. Sensitive node(s) in a latch could be an active and/or a high impedance node(s). In this paper, we have classified previously presented SEU hardened by design latch architectures and reviewed SEU mechanisms in selected RHBD latch architectures on Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology models. Simulation studies using latest fault simulation model have been carried out. Simulation results have revealed some interesting observations described in this paper. Our findings, based on analyses, will provide valuable design inputs for futuristic RHBD latches with advanced technology nodes.     

A low power-delay-product and robust Isolated-DICE based SEU-tolerant latch circuit design

Soft-error interference is a crucial design challenge in the advanced CMOS VLSI circuit designs. In this paper, we proposed a SEU Isolating DICE latch (Iso-DICE) design by combing the new proposed soft-error isolating technique and the inter-latching technique used in the DICE (Calin et al., 1996 [1]) design. To further enhance SEU-tolerance of DICE design, we keep the storage node pairs having the ability to recover the SEU fault occurring in each other pair but also avoid the storage node to be affected by each other. To mitigate the interference effect between dual storage node pairs, we use the isolation mechanism to resist high energy particle strikes instead of the original interlocking design method. Through isolating the output nodes and the internal circuit nodes, the Iso-DICE latch can possess more superior SEU-tolerance as compared with the DICE design (Calin et al., 1996 [1]). As compared with the FERST design (Fazeli, 2009 [2]) which performs with the same superior SEU-tolerance, the proposed Iso-DICE latch consumes 50% less power with only 45% of power delay product in TSMC 90 nm CMOS technology. Under 22 nm PTM model, the proposed Iso-DICE latch can also perform with 11% power delay product saving as compared with the FERST design (Fazeli, 2009 [2]) that performs with the same superior SEU-tolerance.     

一种基于三联锁结构的单粒子翻转加固锁存器

本文提出了一种基于三联锁结构的单粒子翻转加固锁存器。该锁存器使用保护门和反相器在其内部构建三路反馈,以此获得对发生在任一电路节点上的单粒子效应的自恢复能力,有效抑制由粒子轰击半导体引发的电荷沉积带来的影响。本文在详细分析已报道的三种抗辐射锁存器结构可靠性的基础上,针对其在单粒子效应作用下,或单粒子效应和耦合串扰噪声的共同作用下依然可能发生翻转的问题,指出本文提出的锁存器可通过内部的三联锁结构对上述问题进行有效的消除。所有结论均得到电路级单粒子效应注入仿真结果,以及基于经典串扰模型模拟串扰耦合和单粒子效应共同作用的仿真结果的支持和验证。     

Low cost and highly reliable radiation hardened latch design in 65 nm CMOS technology

As a consequence of technology scaling down, gate capacitances and stored charge in sensitive nodes are decreasing rapidly, which makes CMOS circuits more vulnerable to radiation induced soft errors. In this paper, a low cost and highly reliable radiation hardened latch is proposed using 65 nm CMOS commercial technology. The proposed latch can fully tolerate the single event upset (SEU) when particles strike on any one of its single node. Furthermore, it can efficiently mask the input single event transient (SET). A set of HSPICE post-layout simulations are done to evaluate the proposed latch circuit and previous latch circuits designed in the literatures, and the comparison results among the latches of type 4 show that the proposed latch reduces at least 39% power consumption and 67.6% power delay product. Moreover, the proposed latch has a second lowest area overhead and a comparable ability of the single event multiple upsets (SEMUs) tolerance among the latches of type 4. Finally, the impacts of process, supply voltage and temperature variations on our proposed latch and previous latches are investigated.     

基于C单元反馈回路的容SEU锁存器设计

随着电子技术的不断发展,集成电路的特征尺寸不断缩小,导致电路对宇宙高能粒子引发的单粒子翻转愈发敏感。提出了一种对单粒子翻转完全免疫的抗辐射加固锁存器。该锁存器利用具有过滤功能的C单元构建反馈回路,并在锁存器末端使用钟控C单元来阻塞传播至输出端的软错误。HSPICE仿真结果显示,在与TMR锁存器同等可靠性的情况下,该锁存器面积下降50%,延迟下降92%,功耗下降47%,功耗延迟积下降96%。     

An efficient triple-tail cell based PFSCL D latch

In this paper, an efficient positive feedback source-coupled logic (PFSCL) D latch topology is proposed. It uses triple-tail cell concept which results in lesser number of stages as well as gate count in comparison to the traditional PFSCL D latch. The operation of the proposed D latch is described and is supported with mathematical formulations. The functionality is verified through SPICE simulations using TSMC 0.18 µm CMOS technology parameters. It is found that the proposed D latch topology significantly reduces the power consumption and delay in comparison to the traditional PFSCL D latch. The impact of process variation on the proposed and traditional PFSCL D latch at different design corners shows similar variations.     

一种低开销的抗SEU锁存器

随着微电子技术的不断进步,集成电路工艺尺寸不断缩小,工作电压不断降低,节点的临界电荷越来越小,空间辐射引起的单粒子效应逐渐成为影响芯片可靠性的重要因素之一。针对辐射环境中高能粒子对锁存器的影响,提出了一种低开销的抗SEU锁存器(LOHL)。该结构基于C单元的双模冗余,实现对单粒子翻转的防护,从而降低软错误发生的概率。Spice模拟结果显示,与其他相关文献中加固锁存器相比,LOHL在电路面积、延迟和延迟-功耗积上有优势。