Radiation Hardened Cell Library

Product Brochure

PFTN provides standard cell library development services at 130nm - 65nm technology nodes at the wafer fab of the customers' choice. A basic library includes:

  • 96 combinational cell

  • 24 flip-flops, including SEU/SET-hardened DICE flip-flops

  • 30 digital IO cells

Additional cells can be added upon request.

Radiation Tolerance

  • Total ionization dose (TID) tolerance > 300 kRad(Si)
  • SEL immune with threshold LET > 90 MeV-cm2/mg.
  • Static SEU rate < 10-9 #/bit/day in GEO orbit environment.
  • Specialized circuit cells
    • DICE flip-flops, with optinal delay-filtering for enhanced SET tolerance.
    • Clock buffer with reduced SET sensitivity.
    • TMR voter

Radiation tolerance designs are verified with PFTN's fully-physical SEE simulation framework.

dice_cgd_sim_model

Fig. 1 TCAD model of a DICE flipflop used for validating the SEU-hardness of the design.

dice_cgd_wave1

Fig. 2 TCAD simulated voltage waveform of the storage nodes in a DICE flipflop, showing prompt recovery after hit by a heavy ion.

Extensive simulations have been performed at the computing cluster at Cogenda to optimize the layout of circuit cells for SEL immunity and cross-section minimization. Through many design-simulate iterations, hardness is achieved without incurring excessive over-design.

EDA Flow

PFTN uses an in-house automation flow for cell library creation, and provides a set of vendor-neutal EDA views that can be used in the standard ASIC flow of all major EDA vendors.

Item Format
Functional description Verilog
Netlist for LVS CDL
Mask layout GDSII
Synthesis library Liberty
Abstract physical library LEF
Symbol EDIF
Place and routing rules .tf / .lef

PFTN can provide test chip and test keys for radiation hardness tests. A typical design cycle targets a first tape-out in six months.

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