For the safety-critical applications such as biomedical and automobile electronics, the system failure induced by soft errors becomes a major issue of reliability. However, most of the commercial cell libraries do not include radiation-hardened components to build a safety-critical design. Therefore, a delay-adjustable D-flip-flop (DAD-FF) is proposed together with a design flow to construct a radiation-hardened system by automation. To enable such radiation-hardened design into the current design flow, DAD-FF is characterized as a general cell and compiled as a patch in the NanGate FreePDK45 bulk 45-nm open cell library, as an example. The experimental results show that DAD-FF is capable of reducing 1.3 × 1010X soft errors with respect to the standard flip-flop (STD-FF) and resisting over 99.999997% strikes of heavy ions. Meanwhile, four radiation-hardened benchmark circuits are synthesized with DAD-FF cell, and further used to prove the effectiveness against soft errors compared to a prior work, built-in soft-error resilience (BISER), with 18% area and 40% timing improvement. To sum up, DADFF is elaborated from the modeling at the device-level to the validation at the system-level and exhibits its strong robustness to soft errors.

中文翻译：

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DAD-FF：通过延迟可调 D 触发器进行强化设计，以降低软错误率


对于生物医学和汽车电子等安全关键型应用，软错误引起的系统故障成为可靠性的主要问题。然而，大多数商业单元库不包含用于构建安全关键设计的抗辐射组件。因此，提出了延迟可调D触发器（DAD-FF）以及设计流程，以自动化构建抗辐射系统。为了使这种抗辐射设计能够融入当前的设计流程，DAD-FF 被描述为通用单元，并编译为 NanGate FreePDK45 批量 45 nm 开放单元库中的补丁（例如）。实验结果表明，DAD-FF相对于标准触发器（STD-FF）能够减少1.3×1010倍的软错误，并且能够抵抗超过99.999997%的重离子撞击。同时，用 DAD-FF 单元合成了四个抗辐射基准电路，并进一步用于证明与先前的工作相比，内置软错误恢复能力（BISER）具有 18% 的面积和 40% 的软错误恢复能力时序改进。综上所述，DADFF从设备级建模到系统级验证进行了详细阐述，表现出对软错误的强大鲁棒性。