A RHBD LC-Tank Oscillator Design Tolerant to Single-Event Transients

Comparison of a 65 nm CMOS Ring- and LC-Oscillator Based PLL in Terms of TID and SEU Sensitivity

“…Besides long term TID effects, energetic particles generate transients or upsets on nodes that do not contain TMR (if a particle only affects a single node) or nodes that are not heavily decoupled. Various designs have been discussed to obtain a Radiation Hardened By Design PLL based on ring oscillator topologies [8]- [11] and LC structures [12]- [14], also for various technologies [15]. Especially the loop filter has been known to be a sensitive node [16]- [18].…”

Design of SET tolerant LC oscillators using distributed bias circuitry

“…The SET response in LC-tank VCOs has been studied earlier [1][2][3]. The output and the bias transistor nodes of these VCOs are found to be most sensitive to SET effects [2,3].…”

“…The output and the bias transistor nodes of these VCOs are found to be most sensitive to SET effects [2,3]. The output transistor nodes in NMOS-cross coupled VCOs can be made SET tolerant by including PMOS crosscoupled loads [3].…”

“…However, due to their poor phase noise, ring VCOs are generally not used for RF applications. Another way to minimize SET effects on the bias circuitry is to isolate the circuitry by adding a decoupling resistor in series with the bias current transistor [2]. However, the decoupling resistor value cannot be too high and is limited by the voltage headroom, which limits the improvement achieved by adding the resistor.…”

“…Fig. 1a shows the LC-VCO with a single bias resistor (VCO-SBR) reported in [2]. The decoupling resistor (R 1 ) in the bias current path reduces SET effects on VCO output when radiation strike occurs at the drain of the bias transistor.…”