Fully Single Event Double Node Upset Tolerant Design for Magnetic Random Access Memory

Benefitting from its non-volatility, high speed, low power and inherent radiation hardened characteristic, magnetic random access memory (MRAM) has been used in aerospace and avionic electronics. Owing to its high sensing reliability, precharge differential sense amplifier (PCDSA) has been proposed and widely used in MRAM products. However, such PCDSA is based on the conventional CMOS technology and its sensing result is prone to be affected by the single event upset (SEU) and even the single event double node upset (SEDU) when the CMOS technology node shrinks into the nanometer scale. In this paper, we propose a novel PCDSA to tolerate the SEDU, in which the special three-input C-element that behaves as an inverter when its inputs have the same logic value and holds its previous value when its inputs have the different logic values is employed. By using a physics-based STT-MTJ compact model and a commercial CMOS 40 nm design kit, hybrid simulations have been performed to demonstrate its functionality and evaluate its performance. Simulation results show that it can fully tolerate the SEDU when the amount of the deposited charge (Q
_inj
) reaches up to 2 pC. In the worst case where the Q
_inj
is 2 pC, it can achieve a small recover time of 1.3368 ns and low recover energy dissipation of 1.967 pJ with the optimized V
_DD
of 1 V.