Soft-error tolerant transistor/magnetic-tunnel-junction hybrid non-volatile C-element

• Onizawai Naoya

  Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Tohoku University

• Hanyu Takahiro

  Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University

Abstract

A C-element is a key storage cell for constructing asynchronous circuits often used for reliable applications. This brief introduces a soft-error tolerant transistor/magnetic-tunnel-junction (MTJ) hybrid non-volatile C-element. To exploit the MTJ devices that are hardly affected by particle strikes in asynchronous circuits, a self-disabled write circuit is proposed that can write data to the MTJ device, asynchronously. The MOS/MTJ hybrid C-element implemented under a 90 nm CMOS/100 nm MTJ technology is simulated using NS-SPICE (SPICE simulator) that handles both transistors and MTJ devices. The simulation results show that the proposed C-element properly operates under a particle strike that induces a charge amount of 50 fC. It is more robust than a triple-modular-redundancy (TMR)-based C-element under particle strikes. In addition, the proposed C-element can be power-gated because of the non-volatility of the MTJ device, reducing the standby current to 0.41% compared to the TMR-based C-element.

Journal

• IEICE Electronics Express

  IEICE Electronics Express 11 (24), 20141017-20141017, 2014

  The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

Keywords

• single-event upset
• single-event transient
• asynchronous circuits
• spin-torque transfer

Details

• CRID: 1390001205212379648
• NII Article ID: 130004704751
• DOI: 10.1587/elex.11.20141017
• ISSN: 13492543
• Web Site: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/elex/11/24/11_11.20141017/_pdf
• Text Lang: en
• Data Source:
  • JaLC
  • Crossref
  • CiNii Articles
  • KAKEN
• Abstract License Flag: Disallowed