Two 0.8 V, Highly Reliable RHBD 10T and 12T SRAM Cells for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

Aggressive scaling of CMOS technologies requires to pay attention to the reliability issues of circuits. This paper presents two highly reliable RHBD 10T and 12T SRAM cells, which can protect against single-node upsets (SNUs) and double-node upsets (DNUs). The 10T cell mainly consists of two cross-coupled input-split inverters and the cell can robustly keep stored values through a feedback mechanism among its internal nodes. It also has a low cost in terms of area and power consumption, since it uses only a few transistors. Based on the 10T cell, a 12T cell is proposed that uses four parallel access transistors. The 12T cell has a reduced read/write access time with the same soft error tolerance when compared to the 10T cell. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed cells can recover from SNUs and a part of DNUs. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art hardened SRAM cells, the proposed 10T cell can save 28.59% write access time, 55.83% read access time, and 4.46% power dissipation at the cost of 4.04% silicon area on average.