A radiation-hardened sensor instrumentation SoC is presented in this paper. The SoC is implemente... more A radiation-hardened sensor instrumentation SoC is presented in this paper. The SoC is implemented in a standard CMOS technology, and achieves MGy-level TID radiation hardness through radiation-hardening-by-design. The SoC contains several commonly used analog/mixed-signal blocks (e.g., instrumentation amplifier, ADC, bandgap voltage reference, clock reference, multiplexer, etc.) in sensor readout systems. Circuit-level radiation-hardened-by-design techniques are introduced, and the effectiveness of these techniques is proven by on-line gamma-radiation assessments. Finally, implementation details of the sensor instrumentation SoC in a commercial 65nm CMOS technology are discussed.
This article provides a review of semiconductor based ionising radiation sensors to measure accum... more This article provides a review of semiconductor based ionising radiation sensors to measure accumulated dose and detect individual strikes of ionising particles. The measurement of ionising radiation (γ-ray, X-ray, high energy UV-ray and heavy ions, etc.) is essential in several critical reliability applications such as medical, aviation, space missions and high energy physics experiments considering safety and quality assurance. In the last few decades, numerous techniques based on semiconductor devices such as diodes, metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) and solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs), etc., have been reported to estimate the absorbed dose of radiation with sensitivity varying by several orders of magnitude from μGy to MGy. In addition, the mitigation of soft errors in integrated circuits essentially requires detection of charged particle induced transients and digital bit-flips in storage elements. Depending on the particle energies, flux and the...
Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design radiation- and fault-tolerant circuits for spac... more Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design radiation- and fault-tolerant circuits for space applications, to ensure high reliability. However, higher reliability often comes at a cost of increased usage of hardware resources. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) ensures full single fault masking, with a >200% power and area overhead cost. TMR/Simplex ensures full single fault masking with a slightly more complicated circuitry, inefficient use of resource and a >200% power and area overhead cost, but with higher reliability than that of TMR. In this work, a high-reliability Spatial and Time Redundancy (TR) hybrid technique, which does not abandon a working module and is applicable for radiation hardening of half-duty limited DC-DC converters, is proposed and applied to the design of a radiation-tolerant digital controller for a Dual-Switch Forward Converter. The technique has the potential of double fault masking with a <2% increase in resource overhead cost compared to TM...
This paper presents the first fully integrated radiation-tolerant All-Digital Phase-Locked Loop (... more This paper presents the first fully integrated radiation-tolerant All-Digital Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) and Clock and Data Recovery (CDR) circuit for wireline communication applications. Several radiation hardening techniques are proposed to achieve state-of-the-art immunity to Single-Event Effects (SEEs) up to 62.52/mg as well as tolerance to the Total Ionizing Dose (TID) exceeding 1.5Grad. The LC Digitally Controlled Oscillator (DCO) is implemented without MOS varactors, avoiding the use of a highly SEE sensitive circuit element. The circuit is designed to operate at reference clock frequencies from 40–320 or at data rates from 40Mbps–320Mbps and displays a jitter performance of 520 with a power dissipation of only 11 and an FOM of −235 .
This article presents a static random access memory (SRAM)-based flexible radiation monitor. The ... more This article presents a static random access memory (SRAM)-based flexible radiation monitor. The monitor was fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology and it is designed as an application-specific integrated circuit, which comprises 768k bits SRAM cell matrix with individual power supply and a digital control core with a serial peripheral interface (SPI). By adjusting the core voltage of the SRAM matrix, the radiation sensitivity was made flexible. Also, SRAM cells with different threshold voltages were implemented to get further extension on tunable sensitivity range. The monitor has been tested under heavy ions with a linear energy transfer (LET) from 1.5 to 48.5 $\text {MeV}\cdot \text {cm}^{2}$ /mg, high-energy (50–186 MeV) and low-energy (0.7–5 MeV) protons, and 14-MeV and thermal neutrons. An analysis was performed on how single-event upset sensitivity changes while tuning the supply voltage under different radiation environments. The results show that the monitor has the potential for space and facility applications.
2015 15th European Conference on Radiation and Its Effects on Components and Systems (RADECS), 2015
The total-ionizing-dose (TID) radiation tolerance of CMOS temperature sensors is generally limite... more The total-ionizing-dose (TID) radiation tolerance of CMOS temperature sensors is generally limited by the radiation-introduced leakage current in diodes. A dynamic base leakage compensation technique is employed to improve the radiation hardness of the CMOS temperature sensor. The fabricated temperature sensor achieves an accuracy of ±1.7°C from -40°C to 125°C, while the power and area consumption are only 56 μW and 0.07 mm2, respectively. The temperature sensor is assessed with a gamma irradiation experiment with a dose rate of 1 kGy/h, and radiation induced temperature readout drifts are smaller than 0.2% after 1 MGy.
2015 15th European Conference on Radiation and Its Effects on Components and Systems (RADECS), 2015
This paper shows a customized MGy radiation tolerant instrumentation amplifier. The 65 nm CMOS-ba... more This paper shows a customized MGy radiation tolerant instrumentation amplifier. The 65 nm CMOS-based ASIC amplifier has an offset smaller than 1 μV and a noise level below 50 nV/√Hz from DC. It consumes less than 5 mW and has a common-mode-rejection-ratio larger the 100 dB. In addition, it allows a programmable gain setting from 8,16,32,64,128 to 256. The performance of this instrumentation amplifier was monitored during an on-line radiation experiment up to a total ionizing dose larger than 1 MGy, enabling the read-out of the most common nuclear temperature and position sensors.
Fall incidents and the sustained injuries represent the main causes of accidents for elderly peop... more Fall incidents and the sustained injuries represent the main causes of accidents for elderly people, and also the third cause of chronic disability. The rapid detection of a fall event can reduce the mortality risk, avoiding also the aggravation of injuries. In this paper an embedded healthcare system based on a microwave radar is presented. A Continuous Wave (CW) Doppler radar is used to detect the changes in speed of different persons experienced during daily activities, namely falling and normal/random movements. The resulted speed signals are then processed in real-time by a digital signal processor (DSP) in order to detect fall incidents. Experimental results, conducted on real human volunteers in a real room setting, have shown a success rate of 100% in detecting fall events. Moreover, no false positives have been reported.
The ALTIUS-instrument is a three-channel spectral imager, measuring in the ultraviolet, visible a... more The ALTIUS-instrument is a three-channel spectral imager, measuring in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared wavelength domains, that is bound to fly aboard a PROBA-satellite. The goal of the ALTIUS-instrument is to make hyper spectral images of the limb of the earth. In each of ALTIUS' three channels an AOTF (Acousto-Optical Tunable Filter) will be used. For each channel an RF-generator will be developed and subjected to a suite of environmental tests such as thermal-vacuum, vibration, radiation, shock and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC). For the AOTF RF-generator different solutions are possible. Currently the design of an analog Hilbert transform and a high frequency phase-locked loop (PLL) are proposed as possible solutions. The choice of components, the PCB-design and the manufacturing of both designs has to be done in accordance to space qualified standards. This limits the choice of design and lifts the design challenge to a higher level. Because of the limited choice of space qualified components, general commercial approaches are not possible. For this reason specific designs have to be investigated and research has to be done to select the appropriate solution.
Two 1-1-1 MASH time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are presented in this paper. Third-order time do... more Two 1-1-1 MASH time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are presented in this paper. Third-order time domain noise-shaping has been adopted by the TDCs to achieve better than 6 ps resolution. Following a detailed analysis of the noise generation and propagation in the MASH structure, the first prototyping TDC has been realized in CMOS technology. It achieves an ENOB of 11 bits and consumes 1.7 mW from a 1.2 V supply. In the second MASH TDC, a delay-line assisted calibration technique is introduced to mitigate the phase skew caused by the large comparator delay, which is the main limiting factor of the MASH TDC's resolution. The demonstrated TDC achieves an ENOB of 13 bits and a wide input range of 100 ns. This TDC shows a temperature coefficient of within a temperature range of to. It consumes only 0.7 mW and occupies area (core).
Radiation and extreme temperature are the main inhibitors for the use of electronic devices in sp... more Radiation and extreme temperature are the main inhibitors for the use of electronic devices in space applications. Radiation challenges the normal and stable operation of DC-DC converters, used as power supply for onboard systems in satellites and spacecrafts. In this situation, special design techniques known as radiation hardening or radiation tolerant designs have to be employed. In this work, a module level design approach for radiation hardening is addressed. A module in this sense is a constituent of a digital controller, which includes an analog to digital converter (ADC), a digital proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, and a digital pulse width modulator (DPWM). As a new Radiation Hardening by Design technique (RHBD), a four module redundancy technique is proposed and applied to the digital voltage mode controller driving a synchronous buck converter, which has been implemented as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation block in MATLAB/Simulink using Xilinx system...
A novel multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) delta-sigm a (∆Σ) Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) struct... more A novel multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) delta-sigm a (∆Σ) Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) structure is proposed for applicati ons in continuous-time pulsed time-offlight (TOF) rangefinders for nuclear reactor remot e sensing, which requires both high resolution and multi MGy gamma-dose radiation toler ance. The converter, implemented in 0.13 μm CMOS, achieves a time resolution of 5.6 ps and an ENOB of 11 bits. The TDC core consumes only 1.7 mW and occupies an area of 0.11 m m. Owing to the usage of circuit level radiation hardened-by-design techniques, such as pa s ive RC oscillators and constantgm biasing, the TDC exhibits enhanced radiation tolera nce. After a total dose of 3.4 MGy at a high dose rate of 30 kGy/h, the TDC still achieves a time resolution of 10.5 ps. In order to secure the temperature stability of the TDC, a band g p reference is employed to provide reference current and voltage for the TDC core. The total-ionizing-dose (TID) radiation tolerance of bandgap referen...
The GPS L2 band, centered at 1.2276GHz, is planned to enhance the capabilities of civil GPS to ba... more The GPS L2 band, centered at 1.2276GHz, is planned to enhance the capabilities of civil GPS to backup the conventional GPS L1 link. As the L2 receiver is required to detect a low power signal, an LNA with extremely low noise figure is required. In addition, the LNA must ...
Proton direct ionization from low-energy protons has been shown to have a potentially significant... more Proton direct ionization from low-energy protons has been shown to have a potentially significant impact on the accuracy of prediction methods used to calculate the upset rates of memory devices in space applications for state-of-the-art deep sub-micron technologies. The general approach nowadays is to consider a safety margin to apply over the upset rate computed from high-energy proton and heavy ion experimental data. The data reported here present a challenge to this approach. Different upset rate prediction methods are used and compared in order to establish the impact of proton direct ionization on the total upset rate. No matter the method employed the findings suggest that proton direct ionization can contribute to up to 90% of the total upset rate on average for a general selection of space orbits, with peaks of up to 99%. Such results suggest that an approach based on the characterization of the low-energy portion of the proton spectrum would be more convenient for similar technologies than the application of a general safety margin. Based on data presented here, the previously proposed margin of 5 is exceeded, by large amounts in some cases.
Due to the intrinsic masking effects of combinational circuits in digital designs, Single-Event T... more Due to the intrinsic masking effects of combinational circuits in digital designs, Single-Event Transient (SET) effects were considered irrelevant compared to the data rupture caused by Single-Event Upset (SEU) effects. However, the importance of considering SET in Very-Large-System-Integration (VLSI) circuits increases given the reduction of the transistor dimensions and the logic data path depth in advanced technology nodes. Accordingly, the threat of SET in electronics systems for space applications must be carefully addressed along with the SEU characterization. In this work, a systematic prediction methodology to assess and improve the SET immunity of digital circuits is presented. Further, the applicability to full-custom and cell-based design methodologies are discussed, and an analysis based on signal probability and pin assignment is proposed to achieve a more application-efficient SET-aware optimization of synthesized circuits. For instance, a SET-aware pin assignment can ...
This work presents an introduction to radiation hardened Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) for nuclear an... more This work presents an introduction to radiation hardened Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) for nuclear and high-energy physics application. An experimental circuit has been fabricated and irradiated with Xrays up to 600 Mrad. Heavy ions with an LET between 3.2 and 69.2 MeV.cm 2 /mg were used to verify the SEU cross section of the devices. A Two-photon Absorption (TPA) laser facility has been used to provide detailed results on the SEU sensitivity. The presented circuit employs TMR in the digital logic and an asynchronous phase-frequency detector (PFD) is presented. The PLL has a ringand LC-oscillator to be compared experimentally. The circuit has been fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS technology.
A radiation-hardened sensor instrumentation SoC is presented in this paper. The SoC is implemente... more A radiation-hardened sensor instrumentation SoC is presented in this paper. The SoC is implemented in a standard CMOS technology, and achieves MGy-level TID radiation hardness through radiation-hardening-by-design. The SoC contains several commonly used analog/mixed-signal blocks (e.g., instrumentation amplifier, ADC, bandgap voltage reference, clock reference, multiplexer, etc.) in sensor readout systems. Circuit-level radiation-hardened-by-design techniques are introduced, and the effectiveness of these techniques is proven by on-line gamma-radiation assessments. Finally, implementation details of the sensor instrumentation SoC in a commercial 65nm CMOS technology are discussed.
This article provides a review of semiconductor based ionising radiation sensors to measure accum... more This article provides a review of semiconductor based ionising radiation sensors to measure accumulated dose and detect individual strikes of ionising particles. The measurement of ionising radiation (γ-ray, X-ray, high energy UV-ray and heavy ions, etc.) is essential in several critical reliability applications such as medical, aviation, space missions and high energy physics experiments considering safety and quality assurance. In the last few decades, numerous techniques based on semiconductor devices such as diodes, metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) and solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs), etc., have been reported to estimate the absorbed dose of radiation with sensitivity varying by several orders of magnitude from μGy to MGy. In addition, the mitigation of soft errors in integrated circuits essentially requires detection of charged particle induced transients and digital bit-flips in storage elements. Depending on the particle energies, flux and the...
Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design radiation- and fault-tolerant circuits for spac... more Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design radiation- and fault-tolerant circuits for space applications, to ensure high reliability. However, higher reliability often comes at a cost of increased usage of hardware resources. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) ensures full single fault masking, with a >200% power and area overhead cost. TMR/Simplex ensures full single fault masking with a slightly more complicated circuitry, inefficient use of resource and a >200% power and area overhead cost, but with higher reliability than that of TMR. In this work, a high-reliability Spatial and Time Redundancy (TR) hybrid technique, which does not abandon a working module and is applicable for radiation hardening of half-duty limited DC-DC converters, is proposed and applied to the design of a radiation-tolerant digital controller for a Dual-Switch Forward Converter. The technique has the potential of double fault masking with a <2% increase in resource overhead cost compared to TM...
This paper presents the first fully integrated radiation-tolerant All-Digital Phase-Locked Loop (... more This paper presents the first fully integrated radiation-tolerant All-Digital Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) and Clock and Data Recovery (CDR) circuit for wireline communication applications. Several radiation hardening techniques are proposed to achieve state-of-the-art immunity to Single-Event Effects (SEEs) up to 62.52/mg as well as tolerance to the Total Ionizing Dose (TID) exceeding 1.5Grad. The LC Digitally Controlled Oscillator (DCO) is implemented without MOS varactors, avoiding the use of a highly SEE sensitive circuit element. The circuit is designed to operate at reference clock frequencies from 40–320 or at data rates from 40Mbps–320Mbps and displays a jitter performance of 520 with a power dissipation of only 11 and an FOM of −235 .
This article presents a static random access memory (SRAM)-based flexible radiation monitor. The ... more This article presents a static random access memory (SRAM)-based flexible radiation monitor. The monitor was fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology and it is designed as an application-specific integrated circuit, which comprises 768k bits SRAM cell matrix with individual power supply and a digital control core with a serial peripheral interface (SPI). By adjusting the core voltage of the SRAM matrix, the radiation sensitivity was made flexible. Also, SRAM cells with different threshold voltages were implemented to get further extension on tunable sensitivity range. The monitor has been tested under heavy ions with a linear energy transfer (LET) from 1.5 to 48.5 $\text {MeV}\cdot \text {cm}^{2}$ /mg, high-energy (50–186 MeV) and low-energy (0.7–5 MeV) protons, and 14-MeV and thermal neutrons. An analysis was performed on how single-event upset sensitivity changes while tuning the supply voltage under different radiation environments. The results show that the monitor has the potential for space and facility applications.
2015 15th European Conference on Radiation and Its Effects on Components and Systems (RADECS), 2015
The total-ionizing-dose (TID) radiation tolerance of CMOS temperature sensors is generally limite... more The total-ionizing-dose (TID) radiation tolerance of CMOS temperature sensors is generally limited by the radiation-introduced leakage current in diodes. A dynamic base leakage compensation technique is employed to improve the radiation hardness of the CMOS temperature sensor. The fabricated temperature sensor achieves an accuracy of ±1.7°C from -40°C to 125°C, while the power and area consumption are only 56 μW and 0.07 mm2, respectively. The temperature sensor is assessed with a gamma irradiation experiment with a dose rate of 1 kGy/h, and radiation induced temperature readout drifts are smaller than 0.2% after 1 MGy.
2015 15th European Conference on Radiation and Its Effects on Components and Systems (RADECS), 2015
This paper shows a customized MGy radiation tolerant instrumentation amplifier. The 65 nm CMOS-ba... more This paper shows a customized MGy radiation tolerant instrumentation amplifier. The 65 nm CMOS-based ASIC amplifier has an offset smaller than 1 μV and a noise level below 50 nV/√Hz from DC. It consumes less than 5 mW and has a common-mode-rejection-ratio larger the 100 dB. In addition, it allows a programmable gain setting from 8,16,32,64,128 to 256. The performance of this instrumentation amplifier was monitored during an on-line radiation experiment up to a total ionizing dose larger than 1 MGy, enabling the read-out of the most common nuclear temperature and position sensors.
Fall incidents and the sustained injuries represent the main causes of accidents for elderly peop... more Fall incidents and the sustained injuries represent the main causes of accidents for elderly people, and also the third cause of chronic disability. The rapid detection of a fall event can reduce the mortality risk, avoiding also the aggravation of injuries. In this paper an embedded healthcare system based on a microwave radar is presented. A Continuous Wave (CW) Doppler radar is used to detect the changes in speed of different persons experienced during daily activities, namely falling and normal/random movements. The resulted speed signals are then processed in real-time by a digital signal processor (DSP) in order to detect fall incidents. Experimental results, conducted on real human volunteers in a real room setting, have shown a success rate of 100% in detecting fall events. Moreover, no false positives have been reported.
The ALTIUS-instrument is a three-channel spectral imager, measuring in the ultraviolet, visible a... more The ALTIUS-instrument is a three-channel spectral imager, measuring in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared wavelength domains, that is bound to fly aboard a PROBA-satellite. The goal of the ALTIUS-instrument is to make hyper spectral images of the limb of the earth. In each of ALTIUS' three channels an AOTF (Acousto-Optical Tunable Filter) will be used. For each channel an RF-generator will be developed and subjected to a suite of environmental tests such as thermal-vacuum, vibration, radiation, shock and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC). For the AOTF RF-generator different solutions are possible. Currently the design of an analog Hilbert transform and a high frequency phase-locked loop (PLL) are proposed as possible solutions. The choice of components, the PCB-design and the manufacturing of both designs has to be done in accordance to space qualified standards. This limits the choice of design and lifts the design challenge to a higher level. Because of the limited choice of space qualified components, general commercial approaches are not possible. For this reason specific designs have to be investigated and research has to be done to select the appropriate solution.
Two 1-1-1 MASH time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are presented in this paper. Third-order time do... more Two 1-1-1 MASH time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are presented in this paper. Third-order time domain noise-shaping has been adopted by the TDCs to achieve better than 6 ps resolution. Following a detailed analysis of the noise generation and propagation in the MASH structure, the first prototyping TDC has been realized in CMOS technology. It achieves an ENOB of 11 bits and consumes 1.7 mW from a 1.2 V supply. In the second MASH TDC, a delay-line assisted calibration technique is introduced to mitigate the phase skew caused by the large comparator delay, which is the main limiting factor of the MASH TDC's resolution. The demonstrated TDC achieves an ENOB of 13 bits and a wide input range of 100 ns. This TDC shows a temperature coefficient of within a temperature range of to. It consumes only 0.7 mW and occupies area (core).
Radiation and extreme temperature are the main inhibitors for the use of electronic devices in sp... more Radiation and extreme temperature are the main inhibitors for the use of electronic devices in space applications. Radiation challenges the normal and stable operation of DC-DC converters, used as power supply for onboard systems in satellites and spacecrafts. In this situation, special design techniques known as radiation hardening or radiation tolerant designs have to be employed. In this work, a module level design approach for radiation hardening is addressed. A module in this sense is a constituent of a digital controller, which includes an analog to digital converter (ADC), a digital proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, and a digital pulse width modulator (DPWM). As a new Radiation Hardening by Design technique (RHBD), a four module redundancy technique is proposed and applied to the digital voltage mode controller driving a synchronous buck converter, which has been implemented as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation block in MATLAB/Simulink using Xilinx system...
A novel multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) delta-sigm a (∆Σ) Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) struct... more A novel multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) delta-sigm a (∆Σ) Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) structure is proposed for applicati ons in continuous-time pulsed time-offlight (TOF) rangefinders for nuclear reactor remot e sensing, which requires both high resolution and multi MGy gamma-dose radiation toler ance. The converter, implemented in 0.13 μm CMOS, achieves a time resolution of 5.6 ps and an ENOB of 11 bits. The TDC core consumes only 1.7 mW and occupies an area of 0.11 m m. Owing to the usage of circuit level radiation hardened-by-design techniques, such as pa s ive RC oscillators and constantgm biasing, the TDC exhibits enhanced radiation tolera nce. After a total dose of 3.4 MGy at a high dose rate of 30 kGy/h, the TDC still achieves a time resolution of 10.5 ps. In order to secure the temperature stability of the TDC, a band g p reference is employed to provide reference current and voltage for the TDC core. The total-ionizing-dose (TID) radiation tolerance of bandgap referen...
The GPS L2 band, centered at 1.2276GHz, is planned to enhance the capabilities of civil GPS to ba... more The GPS L2 band, centered at 1.2276GHz, is planned to enhance the capabilities of civil GPS to backup the conventional GPS L1 link. As the L2 receiver is required to detect a low power signal, an LNA with extremely low noise figure is required. In addition, the LNA must ...
Proton direct ionization from low-energy protons has been shown to have a potentially significant... more Proton direct ionization from low-energy protons has been shown to have a potentially significant impact on the accuracy of prediction methods used to calculate the upset rates of memory devices in space applications for state-of-the-art deep sub-micron technologies. The general approach nowadays is to consider a safety margin to apply over the upset rate computed from high-energy proton and heavy ion experimental data. The data reported here present a challenge to this approach. Different upset rate prediction methods are used and compared in order to establish the impact of proton direct ionization on the total upset rate. No matter the method employed the findings suggest that proton direct ionization can contribute to up to 90% of the total upset rate on average for a general selection of space orbits, with peaks of up to 99%. Such results suggest that an approach based on the characterization of the low-energy portion of the proton spectrum would be more convenient for similar technologies than the application of a general safety margin. Based on data presented here, the previously proposed margin of 5 is exceeded, by large amounts in some cases.
Due to the intrinsic masking effects of combinational circuits in digital designs, Single-Event T... more Due to the intrinsic masking effects of combinational circuits in digital designs, Single-Event Transient (SET) effects were considered irrelevant compared to the data rupture caused by Single-Event Upset (SEU) effects. However, the importance of considering SET in Very-Large-System-Integration (VLSI) circuits increases given the reduction of the transistor dimensions and the logic data path depth in advanced technology nodes. Accordingly, the threat of SET in electronics systems for space applications must be carefully addressed along with the SEU characterization. In this work, a systematic prediction methodology to assess and improve the SET immunity of digital circuits is presented. Further, the applicability to full-custom and cell-based design methodologies are discussed, and an analysis based on signal probability and pin assignment is proposed to achieve a more application-efficient SET-aware optimization of synthesized circuits. For instance, a SET-aware pin assignment can ...
This work presents an introduction to radiation hardened Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) for nuclear an... more This work presents an introduction to radiation hardened Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) for nuclear and high-energy physics application. An experimental circuit has been fabricated and irradiated with Xrays up to 600 Mrad. Heavy ions with an LET between 3.2 and 69.2 MeV.cm 2 /mg were used to verify the SEU cross section of the devices. A Two-photon Absorption (TPA) laser facility has been used to provide detailed results on the SEU sensitivity. The presented circuit employs TMR in the digital logic and an asynchronous phase-frequency detector (PFD) is presented. The PLL has a ringand LC-oscillator to be compared experimentally. The circuit has been fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS technology.
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Papers by Paul Leroux