“A New Soft-Error Resilient Voltage-Mode Quaternary Latch” by Eduardo Rhod, Luigi Carro, Luca Sterpone

Multiple-valued logic circuits represent nowadays a new technology challenge to realize integrated circuits using less silicon area and having low power and high frequency characteristics. Quaternary logic is increasingly attractive for Field Programmable Gate array devices, where the costs of area, power and of interconnection delays play a key role in the overall circuit costs. These characteristics make quaternary logic circuits appealing for space applications, where area and power reduction are extremely desired. In order to enable multiple-value logic for space applications it is necessary to evaluate and harden this technology against radiation effects inducing soft-errors. In this paper, we firstly propose a characterization of a voltage-mode quaternary latch in the presence of induced transients that vary in intensity, local and time of transient injection, as well as the value of the input stimulus. Secondly, we present a new architecture of the latch circuit in order to allow the detection and correction of any radiation-induced effect. Detailed experimental analysis demonstrated the radiation sensitivity to transient effects of classical and hardened quaternary logic latch. Results demonstrated that the proposed design is fully robust against soft errors with respect to the standard design.