Fault Tolerant Flip-Flop Design for Ultra-Low PowerSubthreshold Logic

Low power consumption and radiation hardness aregenerally competing requirements for spaceelectronics as well as many earth-bound highreliability applications. Recently, subthresholdlogic has emerged as a technology that can deliverthe theoretical minimum energy per computation byrunning at ultra-low levels. The resultingperformance degradation is tolerable due the dramaticincrease in energy efficiency. However, operatingcircuits at such low voltages decreases the criticalcharge - Qcrit - required to corrupt the contents ofmemories and sequential elements. The marriage ofsubthreshold logic and high-reliability electronicsis inevitable, yet there has been to date noinvestigation of the effects of radiation on circuitsthat operate at such low voltages. This bookprovides a comprehensive comparison of a variety oftraditional flip-flop designs at subthreshold levels- not just in terms of performance, power and areabut radiation hardness as well. Furthermore, a novelflip-flop design is presented, which is optimized forrobust subthreshold operation.

Autorentext

Gaurav Dukle received the Master of Science in ComputerEngineering degree from the University of Texas at El Paso, USA.He received the Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics andTelecommunication from the University of Pune, India. He iscurrently working as a Circuit Design Engineer with IntelCorporation, USA.

Klappentext
Low power consumption and radiation hardness are generally competing requirements for space electronics as well as many earth-bound high reliability applications. Recently, subthreshold logic has emerged as a technology that can deliver the theoretical minimum energy per computation by running at ultra-low levels. The resulting performance degradation is tolerable due the dramatic increase in energy efficiency. However, operating circuits at such low voltages decreases the critical charge - Qcrit - required to corrupt the contents of memories and sequential elements. The marriage of subthreshold logic and high-reliability electronics is inevitable, yet there has been to date no investigation of the effects of radiation on circuits that operate at such low voltages. This book provides a comprehensive comparison of a variety of traditional flip-flop designs at subthreshold levels - not just in terms of performance, power and area but radiation hardness as well. Furthermore, a novel flip-flop design is presented, which is optimized for robust subthreshold operation.