A High-Reliability 12T SRAM Radiation-Hardened Cell for Aerospace Applications

The static random-access memory (SRAM) cells used in the high radiation environment of aerospace have become highly vulnerable to single-event effects (SEE). Therefore, a 12T SRAM-hardened circuit (RHB-12T cell) for the soft error recovery is proposed using the radiation hardening design (RHBD) concept. To verify the performance of the RHB-12T, the proposed cell is simulated by the 28 nm CMOS process and compared with other hardened cells (Quatro-10T, WE-Quatro-12T, RHM-12T, RHD-12T, and RSP-14T). The simulation results show that the RHB-12T cell can recover not only from single-event upset caused by their sensitive nodes but also from single-event multi-node upset caused by their storage node pairs. The proposed cell exhibits 1.14x/1.23x/1.06x shorter read delay than Quatro-10T/WE-Quatro-12T/RSP-14T and 1.31x/1.11x/1.18x/1.37x shorter write delay than WE-Quatro-12T/RHM-12T/RHD-12T/RSP-14T. It also shows 1.35x/1.11x/1.04x higher read stability than Quatro-10T/RHM-12T/RHD-12T and 1.12x/1.04x/1.09x higher write ability than RHM-12T/RHD-12T/RSP-14T. All these improvements are achieved at the cost of a slightly larger area and power consumption.