Radiation hardened P-Quatro 12T SRAM cell with strong SEU tolerance for aerospace applications

Abstract

The aerospace environment contains extremely energetic particles that trigger single-event transients (SET), leading to single-event upsets (SEU) in the memory cell. An efficient SRAM cell must be designed to tolerate soft error to withstand the extreme environment. This paper proposes a highly efficient radiation hardened-by-design 12T P-Quatro SRAM cell based on a polarity upset mechanism. The proposed cell has better writability, and WSNM is 1.08$\times$ higher than its counterpart We-Quatro SRAM cell. The read access time of the proposed SRAM cell is 0.96$\times$, 0.91$\times$, 0.99$\times$, 0.98$\times$ smaller than 6T, Quatro, We-Quatro, and NQuatro SRAM cells, and 1.01$\times$ higher than RHD12T cell, and the write delay of the proposed SRAM is 0.93$\times$, 0.46$\times$, 0.72$\times$, 0.41$\times$, 0.47$\times$, less than that of 6T, Quatro, We-Quatro, RHD12T, and NQuatro respectively. 2000 Monte Carlo simulation for power dissipation and upset margin reveals that the process variation has less impact on the proposed SRAM and 1.64$\times$ better tolerance against logic flipping. Further, for the P-Quatro, the critical charge is 41.51 fC and is 2.05$\times$, 1.75$\times$, 1.93$\times$, and 1.48$\times$ greater than Quatro, We-Quatro, RHD12T, and NQuatro memory cells. We conducted an assessment using an electrical quality matrix (EQM) that takes into account all performance parameters. The findings reveal that the EQM of the proposed cell surpasses that of the 6T, Quatro, We-Quatro, RHD12T, and NQuatro SRAM cells by factors of 0.82$\times$, 0.35$\times$, 0.49$\times$, 0.71$\times$, and 0.21$\times$, respectively. This indicates that the proposed cell demonstrates superior electrical quality across various metrics compared to the other SRAM cell designs evaluated.