Cost-Effective and Highly Reliable Circuit-Components Design for Safety-Critical Applications

With the reduction of technology nodes now reaching 2 nm, circuits become increasingly susceptible to external perturbations. Thereby, soft errors, such as single-node-upset (SNU), single-event-transient (SET), double-node-upset (DNU), and even triple-node-upset (TNU), must be considered for safety-critical applications. This article first presents four advanced circuit components (i.e., voters), that have very small overhead compared with traditional voters. The proposed Advanced Triple-Modular-Redundancy (ATMR) Quadruple-Modular-Redundancy (AQMR) voters only consist six inverters, respectively, provide effective tolerance against SNUs DNUs. To further filter SETs, a Schmitt-trigger (ST) instead an inverter at output-level is used construct ATMR-ST AQMR-ST These can also extended tolerate TNUs. Next, these are latch hardening, so this series voter-based designs, ensure high reliability cost-effectiveness. Simulation results demonstrate node-upset and/or SET-filterability latches, respectively. ATMR voter reduce delay, power, area by 55.2, 32.8, 32.2%, TMR voter; so-called high-impedance state-insensitive, TNU-tolerant, SET-filterable 78.9, 15.8, 28.6%, state-of-the-art TNU hardened latch.