A Novel Radiation-Hardened 14T SRAM Bitcell Based on 16nm FinFET

A novel radiation-hardened 14T (NRH-14T) SRAM cell based on 16nm FinFET process is designed in this paper. The NRH-14T cell can recover from errors induced by single-event upsets (SEUs) and is capable of resisting multiple-bit upsets caused by charge-sharing effects. The NRH-14T cell employs an interlocking structure to protect against SEUs. To address the write-failure issue caused by the interlocking structure, four access transistors are utilized in NRH-14T cell. Due to the small size of FinFET devices, the charge-sharing effect is more likely to induce multiple-bit upsets in the circuit, thereby leading to hardening failure. To reduce the impact of charge sharing and recover from multiple-bit upsets with minimal area cost, an optimized NRH-14T cell layout is designed and verified. The single-event transient (SET) pulse waveform generated by particle strikes on FinFET devices, distinct from that of planar devices, is extracted and employed to verify the error-tolerance performance of the NRH-14T cell. Verification results indicate that the NRH-14T cell, with an acceptable increase in area cost, achieves 30.89ns read speed and 49.32ns write speed, can resist SEUs under all conditions with a critical charge of 13fC, and can recover from multiple-bit upsets.