Design of SEL Self-Recovery Hardness for 90nm COTS Devices Using R-C-S Network with DC-DC Converter

Abstract

An efficient Single Event Latch-up (SEL) self-recovery hardness design using an R-C-S network in the front of a DC-DC converter is proposed in this brief. Conventional SEL hardness assurance is suffering from increased circuit design area and low reliability of the COTS devices. To overcome these problems., the proposed design makes a further contribution to the hardness of SEL. The operational mechanism of the proposed design is that the R-C-S network changes the latch-up voltage of the device through the intrinsic properties of the DC-DC converter. The latch-up voltage is carried through three phases of dropping, oscillation and rising, enabling the device to implement hardness and self-recovery. Meanwhile, simulation and laser tests are employed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. Additionally, through comparison with conventional hardness designs of power-off restarting and current limiting by resistor, it is evidently observed that the proposed method has current continuity characteristics and uses 5 components instead of 11 for power-off restarting. And the proposed method effectively exits the device from SEL and reduces the error bits by 72.2% compared to conventional resistor hardness.