Radiation Effects in XOR Logic Gates at 16nm CMOS and FinFET Technology

Circuits are becoming more susceptible to radiation effects due to technology scaling. This work presents a comparative analysis of radiation sensitivity for different topologies of XOR gates at 16nm. The gates are implemented considering two devices: Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) and Fin Field-Effect Transistor (FinFET) and two logics: Complementary Logic (CMOS logic) and Pass-Transistor Logic (PTL). To allow a more detailed comparison, this work also discusses the delay and power results for each XOR version. XOR gates based on PTL have shown more robustness against radiation effects when compared with the gates implemented with CMOS logic, with a Linear Energy Transfer (LET) threshold being almost 30% higher for CMOS devices and up to 20% greater for FinFET devices. Furthermore, FinFET-based circuits are about three times more robust than CMOS technology, with an improvement on the LET threshold for both logic families evaluated.