Radiation Tolerant 14T SRAM Cell for Avionics Applications

The impact of high-energy particles in space like cosmic rays and alpha particles flips the stored data in an SRAM cell. This chapter proposes a highly reliable soft error immune with enhanced critical charge 14T (SIC14T) SRAM cell that is radiation-hardened by design and has an increased critical charge that can withstand both single-event upsets (SEU) and single-event multi-node upsets (SEMNU). We compare the performance of the proposed cell with that of other considered SRAM cells, such as the SRRD12T, RSP14T, SEA14T, and 6T SRAM cell which were simulated in 45-nm CMOS technology in Cadence Virtuoso with a supply voltage of 1 V and 27  \(\mathrm {^{\circ }}\) C operating temperature. Both SEU and SEMNU caused at the storage node of SIC14T are successfully recovered. The proposed SRAM cell has 1.02 \(\mathrm {\times }\) , 0.6 \(\mathrm {\times }\) , 0.72 \(\mathrm {\times }\) , and 4.64 \(\mathrm {\times }\) better write stability, read access time, leakage power, and critical charge than the SRRD12T with 1.68 \(\mathrm {\times }\) area overhead. We also investigated the effect of supply voltage and temperature variations on SRAM stability. For the process variations analysis, we performed 2000 Monte Carlo simulations for the leakage power dissipation for all the considered circuits.