A Low Overhead Single Event Transient Tolerant Bandgap Reference Based on Radiation-Hardened-By-Design (RHBD) Technique

With the advancement of integrated circuit technology, bandgap reference circuits operating in space environments exhibit increasing susceptibility to single-event transient (SET) effects. Based on radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) technique, two single event transient (SET) hardened modules (one is the SET amplitude hardened module and the other is the SET width hardened module) are proposed and employed in a typical BGR circuit. The post-layout simulations show a good suppression of SET is achieved. Compared with reported RHBD techniques (including the multi-modular redundancy technique, isolation technique, and RC filter technique), the proposed hardened modules show a lower area overhead (with layout area of 392.3 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu m^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>). The SET amplitude hardened module based on Schmitt-Trigger inverter can be implemented in other types of BGR circuits. Furthermore, compared with state-of-the-art BGR designs, the hardened BGR design shows that a mean value of temperature coefficient is 10.9ppm/<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>C over -40<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ \sim 150^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula> C at a 2.5V supply. The mean output voltage is 1.215V and the 3<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sigma$</tex-math></inline-formula>-accuracy of Vout is 1.12%.