RTQCC-14T: Radiation Tolerant Quadruple Cross Coupled Robust SRAM Design for Radiation Prone Environments

Abstract

The state-of-the-art DICE SRAM is immune to Single Node Upset (SNU) in the radiation environment; however, it consumes significant leakage power. The leakage power is reduced in the state-of-the-art Quatro-10T SRAM, but Quatro-10T is not entirely immune to SNU and suffers from it in high radiation environment. In this work, we propose a Radiation Tolerant Quadruple Cross Coupled-14T (RTQCC-14T) SRAM with improved SNU tolerance with the least leakage power among existing techniques. The proposed design also shows better results in other SRAM parameters such as write access time, read access time, read static noise margin, word line write trip voltage and critical charge than most existing techniques. It exhibits better figure of merit among all the state-of-the-art methods. As compared to Quatro-10T, the proposed design has 1.48$\times$ shorter write access time, 1.42$\times$ less leakage power, 3.99$\times$ higher word line write trip voltage, and 1.94$\times$ higher critical charge respectively @ VDD = 0.9 V at 28 nm CMOS technology.