Novel Double-Node-Upset-Tolerant Memory Cell Designs Through Radiation-Hardening-by-Design and Layout

This paper presents two novel memory cell designs that can completely tolerate double-node upsets. First, a layout dependent cell is proposed. Since the cell has many redundant storage nodes, the cell achieves the following robustness: 1) In the case of 1 being stored, the cell can self-recover from any double-node upset (DNU) as well as any single node upset (SNU); 2) in the case of 0 being stored, the cell can self-recover from any double-adjacent-node upset (DANU), partial double-separated-node upset (DSNU) as well as any SNU. Any other DSNU can be tolerated by the cell due to the use of the layout approach. Second, a layout-independent cell is proposed that can self-recover from any DNU as well as any SNU. Simulation results validate the robustness of the proposed cell designs. Furthermore, compared with typical existing radiation hardened memory cells, the proposed layout-dependent cell saves 55.60% read access time and 33.76% write access time at the costs of 4.28% power dissipation and 39.01% silicon area on average, still low compared with layout-independent cell designs.