Radiation Hardened Area-Efficient 10T SRAM Cell for Space Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a new radiation-hardened 10T SRAM cell with very low area overhead. The HSPICE simulation results carried out using double exponential current source model demonstrate that proposed cell not only fully recovers single-event upsets (SEUs) at any of its sensitive node but also tolerates single-event multi-node upsets (SEMNUs) on two fixed nodes independent of the stored value. The simulation results also confirm that the proposed cell shows improved hold/read static noise margin, smaller write delay, consumes low leakage power at the cost of low write margin compared with most of the other radiation hardened cells. At the same time, it shows only 66% area overhead compared with 6T cell, whereas most of the other radiation hardened cells show more than 95% area overhead. Therefore the proposed cell could be a good choice for aerospace applications that demand high read stability, low leakage and stringent area requirement.