Soft Error Hardened Latch Scheme with Forward Body Bias in a 90-nm Technology and Beyond

Yoshihide KOMATSU
Yukio ARIMA
Koichiro ISHIBASHI

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E89-C    No.3    pp.384-391
Publication Date: 2006/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1093/ietele/e89-c.3.384
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design Technology in the Sub-100 nm Era)
Category: Soft Error
Keyword: 
cosmic-ray,  critical charge,  forward body bias,  alpha-particles,  soft error rate,  

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Summary: 
This paper describes a soft error hardened latch (SEH-Latch) scheme that has an error correction function in the fine process. The storage node of the latch is separated into three electrodes and a soft error on one node is collected by the other two nodes despite the large amount and long-lasting influx of radiation-induced charges. To achieve this, we designed two types of SEH-Latch circuits and a standard latch circuit using 130-nm 2-well, 3-well, and also 90-nm 2-well CMOS processes. The proposed circuit demonstrated immunity that was two orders higher through an irradiation test using alpha-particles, and immunity that was one order higher through neutron irradiation. We also demonstrated forward body bias control, which improves alpha-ray immunity by 26% for a standard latch and achieves 44 times improvement in the proposed latch.