Comparative Study of RHBD Techniques at a 3-nm Bulk FinFET Node

With the scaling of technology nodes, it is crucial to assess various design strategies for radiation hardening against single-event effects (SEEs). In this study, a variety of radiation hardening by design (RHBD) techniques are evaluated at a 3-nm bulk fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) technology node for alpha particles, heavy-ions, and 14-MeV neutron exposures for SEE. Experimental results show that RHBD effectiveness is strongly dependent on particle linear energy transfer (LET) and layout. Designs implementing layout-aware sensitive-node separation had the lowest single-event upset (SEU) vulnerability. Moderate hardening techniques, using guard-gate or Schmitt-trigger, showed SEU hardness dependent on particle LET. Due to charge collection by multiple circuit nodes, the triple-modular redundancy (TMR) approach did not result in the expected SEU performances. Simulation results indicate that the placement of sensitive nodes of flip-flop (FF) designs is the primary factor affecting the effectiveness of RHBD techniques at this node.