Radiation-Hardened Design of TCAM for Single-Event Upset Tolerance

Although magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) is intrinsically immune to radiation, non-volatile ternary content-addressable memory (NV-TCAM) cells are still susceptible to single event upset (SEU). This results in erroneous search results. In this paper, we propose a radiation-hardened non-volatile ternary content-addressable memory (RH-TCAM) cell based on spin transfer torque magnetic tunnel junction (STT-MTJ) to address the impact of SEU. In order to demonstrate its functionality, hybrid simulations have been performed by using a STT-MTJ compact model and the CMOS 28 nm design kit. Simulation results show that the proposed RH-TCAM can fully tolerate SEU when the amount of the deposited charge (Q<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">inj</inf>) reaches up to 2 pC.