An SEU-Tolerant Programmable Frequency Divider

Liang Wang,  Suge Yue,  Yuanfu Zhao,  Long Fan
Beijing Microelectronics Technology Institute


Abstract

A programmable frequency divider, designed to mitigate radiation-induced Single Event Upsets (SEU), is proposed. The circuit is immune to both SEUs from storage circuits and that induced by Single Event Transient (SET) from combinational logic. The SEU immunity of storage element is achieved by constructing the element with a novel SEU-hardened latch which doesn’t need transistor sizing to be functional and SEU-tolerant. SET tolerance is achieved by making full use of the existing parts and producing further necessary redundancies. The proposed structures are implemented and simulated using a standard 0.18micron logic process model. Simulation results show that the proposed frequency divider works well both for normal operations and during radiation attacking, with acceptable area and power overhead.