Design of self correcting radiation hardened digital circuits using decoupled ground bus.

With shrinking device sizes, modern digital circuits are becoming increasingly susceptible to transient errors due to charged particle strikes on the sensitive nodes of the circuit. In this paper we present a simple technique to implement self correcting, radiation hardened digital circuits through the use of a decoupled ground bus. The technique relies on using the error signal as a design variable in the logic being realized and employs a state machine based design approach for combinational logic design. Simulation results show that the proposed technique is reliable over all corners and robust against random process and mismatch variations. Our technique results in average 29.43% delay, 13.8% power and negligible area overhead than non hardened static and domino designs.