A RADIATION-TOLERANT AND ENERGY-EFFICIENT TWELVETRANSISTOR STATIC MEMORY CELL WITH SELF-RESTORATIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

A novel radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) 12-transistor (12T) SRAM cell is proposed, leveraging a practical layout topology and an understanding of the physical mechanisms underlying soft errors. Simulation results demonstrate that the 12T cell provides superior radiation tolerance, outperforming conventional 13T designs in stability and reliability. Compared to the 13T cell, the proposed 12T cell achieves significant improvements in area (18.9% reduction), power consumption (23.8% reduction), and read/write access time (171.6% improvement), while maintaining a higher hold static noise margin of 986.2 mV. The design also exhibits enhanced fault tolerance, making it particularly suitable for aerospace applications, where memories implemented in CMOS technology must withstand single-event upsets (SEUs) caused by complex cosmic radiation. By addressing the challenges of decreasing critical charge and supply voltage in advanced CMOS processes, the proposed RHBD 12T cell offers an area-efficient, high-reliability solution for radiation-resilient memory storage in harsh space environments.