DESIGN OF BUILT-IN CURRENT SENSORS FOR CONCURRENT CHECKING IN RADIATION ENVIRONMENTS

In the past, the design of circuits that are reliable in total-dose environments has been based on fault avoidance techniques (radiation hardened circuits). Fault detection (the other fundamental technique for designing reliable electronic systems) has not been explored for faults induced by total-dose. In this paper we propose a technique for concurrent checking of these faults in static CMOS circuits. It performs concurrent monitoring of static current by means of Built-m Current Sensors (BICS) and detects the leakage current which accompanies the parametric shifts. In addition to this fundamental benefit, using BICSs allows the selection of high quality circuits during manufacturing testing, resulting in higher mean time to failure.