Soft-error tolerant transistor/ magnetic-tunnel-junction hybrid non-volatile C-element

A C-element is a key storage cell for constructing asynchronous circuits often used for reliable applications. This brief introduces a soft-error tolerant transistor/magnetic-tunnel-junction (MTJ) hybrid non-volatile Celement. To exploit the MTJ devices that are hardly affected by particle strikes in asynchronous circuits, a self-disabled write circuit is proposed that can write data to the MTJ device, asynchronously. The MOS/MTJ hybrid C-element implemented under a 90 nm CMOS/100 nm MTJ technology is simulated using NS-SPICE (SPICE simulator) that handles both transistors and MTJ devices. The simulation results show that the proposed C-element properly operates under a particle strike that induces a charge amount of 50 fC. It is more robust than a triple-modular-redundancy (TMR)-based Celement under particle strikes. In addition, the proposed C-element can be power-gated because of the non-volatility of the MTJ device, reducing the standby current to 0.41% compared to the TMR-based C-element.