With aggressive scaling down in integrated circuit technology, the design of double-node-upset (DNU)-resilient latches have become a major issue regarding radiation hardening by design (RHBD). The conventional DNU-resilient latches are mostly based on the Muller C-element (MCE) and the dual-interlocked storage cell (DICE) element, which exhibit severe limitations: charge sharing during the read operation at a system level and large power consumption. Overcoming these limitations, this brief proposes a DNU-resilient latch based on a novel latch element. The proposed latch fully exploits upset polarity awareness, achieving the maximum number of single-event upset (SEU)-insensitive nodes. We develop a novel double modular redundancy architecture for the DNU-resilient latch design with one SEU-immune module. Based on simulation results, the proposed latch achieves up to 27.6X average power-delay-area-product (PDAP) improvement over state-of-the-art DNU-resilient latches.

Due to aggressive scaling down, multiple-node-upset hardened design has become a major concern regarding radiation hardening. The proposed latch overcomes the architecture and performance limitations of state-of-the-art double-node-upset (DNU)-resilient latches. A novel stacked latch element is developed with multiple thresholds, regular architecture, increased number of single-event upset (SEU)-insensitive nodes, low power dissipation, and high robustness. The radiation-aware layout considering layout-level issues is also proposed. Compared with state-of-the-art DNU-resilient latches, simulation results show that the proposed latch exhibits up to 92% delay and 80% power reduction in data activity ratio (DAR) of 100%. The radiation simulation using the dual-double exponential current source model shows that the proposed latch has the strongest radiation-hardening capability among the other DNU-resilient latches.