Cost-Effective and Highly Reliable Circuit-Components Design for Safety-Critical Applications

With the reduction of technology nodes now reaching 2 nm, circuits become increasingly susceptible to external perturbations. Thereby, soft errors, such as single-node-upset (SNU), single-event-transient (SET), double-node-upset (DNU), and even triple-node-upset (TNU), must be considered for safety-critical applications. This article first presents four advanced circuit components (i.e., advanced voters), that have very small overhead compared with the traditional voters. The proposed Advanced Triple-Modular-Redundancy (ATMR) and Advanced Quadruple-Modular-Redundancy (AQMR) voters only consist of four and six inverters, respectively, to provide effective tolerance against SNUs and DNUs. To further filter SETs, a Schmitt-trigger (ST) instead of an inverter at the output-level is used to construct the ATMR-ST and AQMR-ST voters. These proposed voters can also be extended to tolerate TNUs. Next, these voters are used for latch hardening, so that this article also presents a series of voter-based latch designs, to ensure high reliability with cost-effectiveness. Simulation results demonstrate the node-upset tolerance and/or SET-filterability of the proposed voters and voter-based latches, respectively. Simulation results also demonstrate that the proposed ATMR voter can reduce delay, power, and area by 55.2, 32.8, and 32.2%, respectively, compared with the traditional TMR voter; the proposed so-called high-impedance state-insensitive, TNU-tolerant, and SET-filterable latch can reduce delay, power, and area by 78.9, 15.8, and 28.6%, respectively, compared with the state-of-the-art TNU hardened latch.

Automated summary

With the reduction of technology nodes, circuits become more susceptible to external perturbations. This article presents advanced circuit components and latch designs based on voters, which effectively mitigate soft errors and improve reliability.