Radiation Hardened NULL Convention Logic Asynchronous Circuit Design

Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications

Liang Zhou¹  Scott C. Smith²  Jia Di³ 

[1] NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA 95050, USA;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58108, USA; E-Mail:;Department of Computer Science & Computer Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA; E-Mail:

关键词: NULL Convention Logic (NCL);    single event upset (SEU);    single event latchup (SEL);    radiation hardening by design;   

DOI  :  10.3390/jlpea5040216

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

This paper proposes a radiation hardened NULL Convention Logic (NCL) architecture that can recover from a single event latchup (SEL) or single event upset (SEU) fault without deadlock or any data loss. The proposed architecture is analytically proved to be SEL resistant, and by extension, proved to be SEU resistant. The SEL/SEU resistant version of a 3-stage full-word pipelined NCL 4 × 4 unsigned multiplier was implemented using the IBM cmrf8sf 130 nm 1.2 V process at the transistor level and simulated exhaustively with SEL fault injection to validate the proposed architectures. Compared with the original version, the SEL/SEU resilient version has 1.31× speed overhead, 2.74× area overhead, and 2.79× energy per operation overhead.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.