A ReRAM-Based Non-Volatile and Radiation-Hardened Latch Design

Aibin Yan; Shaojie Wei; Yu Chen; Zhengzheng Fan; Zhengfeng Huang; Jie Cui; Patrick Girard; Xiaoqing Wen

doi:10.3390/mi13111802

A ReRAM-Based Non-Volatile and Radiation-Hardened Latch Design

Micromachines (Basel). 2022 Oct 22;13(11):1802. doi: 10.3390/mi13111802.

Authors

Aibin Yan¹, Shaojie Wei¹, Yu Chen¹, Zhengzheng Fan¹, Zhengfeng Huang², Jie Cui¹, Patrick Girard³, Xiaoqing Wen⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China.
² School of Microelectronics, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China.
³ Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier, University of Montpellier, CNRS, 34000 Montpellier, France.
⁴ Graduate School of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka 804-8550, Japan.

Abstract

In aerospace environments, high reliability and low power consumption of chips are essential. To greatly reduce power consumption, the latches of a chip need to enter the power down operation. In this operation, employing non-volatile (NV) latches can retain circuit states. Moreover, a latch can be hit by a radiative particle in the aerospace environment, which can cause a severe soft error in the worst case. This paper presents a NV-latch based on resistive random-access memories (ReRAMs) for NV and robust applications. The proposed NV-latch is radiation-hardened with low overhead and can restore values after power down operation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NV-latch can completely provide radiation hardening capability against single-event upsets (SEUs) and can restore values after power down operation. The proposed NV-latch can reduce the number of transistors in the storage cells by 50% on average compared with the other similar solutions.

Keywords: circuit reliability; latch design; non-volatile; resistive random-access memory; single-event upset.

Grants and funding

This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China grant number 61974001 and 61874156, Open Project of the State Key Laboratory of Computing Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences grant number CARCHA202101, NSFC-JSPS Exchange Program grant number 62111540164, Outstanding Young Talent Support Program Key Project of Anhui Provincial Universities grant number gxyqZD2022005, JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) grant number 21H03411. And The APC was funded by 61974001.