AMSER-FF: Area-Minimized Soft-Error-Recoverable Flip-Flop for Radiation Hardening

Among various radiation hardening by de-signs (RHBD), triple-modular redundancy (TMR) is frequently used to correct soft errors. One of the well-known TMR solutions is called $\Delta{\mathrm TMR}$, which makes three copies of flop-flops (FFs) and inserts different delay buffers in front of data inputs of the second and third FFs for capturing soft errors. However, such solution has shortcomings in the area/power overhead and the imbalanced rise/fall delay. As a result, a novel TMR flip-flop design called area-minimized soft-error-recoverable flip-flop (AMSER-FF) is proposed in this paper to reduce the area/power overhead and timing degradation. Each AMSER-FF embeds a reference voltage generator (RVG), which generates balanced rise/fall delay and has fixed area utilization instead of inserting delay buffers for correcting errors. Experimental results show that AMSER-FF achieves lower area overhead, power overhead and less timing degradation than $\Delta\mathrm{TMR}$.