Frequency Dependence of Alpha-Particle Induced Soft Error Rates of Flip-Flops in 40-nm CMOS Technology.

<?Pub Dtl?>In this paper, the alpha-particle induced soft error rate of two flip-flops are investigated as a function of operating frequency between 80 MHz and 1.2 GHz. The two flip-flops—an unhardened D flip-flop and a hardened pseudo-DICE flip-flop were designed in a TSMC 40 nm bulk CMOS technology. The error rates of both flip-flops increase with frequency. Analyses show that an internal single-event transient based upset mechanism is responsible for the frequency dependence of the error rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]