In safety-critical applications such as biomedical and automotive electronics, soft errors induced by radiation particles pose a significant reliability concern. This paper presents a novel Filtering Buffer-based D Flip-Flop (FB-DFF) designed to enhance radiation hardening while minimizing area and timing overheads. The FB-DFF integrates a Filtering Buffer (FB) and an Auto Delay Element (ADE) to effectively filter out transient errors and ensure the correct input signal is latched. The Single-Master Dual-Slaves (SMDS) architecture further prevents error propagation to the output. Experimental results demonstrate that FB-DFF can resist radiation particles below 77 LET, providing full protection against both Single Event Transient (SET) and Single Event Upset (SEU). Compared to existing designs, FB-DFF reduces area overhead by 44% and timing overhead by 144% at the chip level, making it a highly efficient solution for radiation-hardened applications. The proposed FB-DFF offers a balanced trade-off between radiation hardening capability, area, and timing performance, making it suitable for integration into various safety-critical systems.

Soft errors (primarily single-event transients (SET) and single-event upsets (SEU)) are receiving increased attention due to the increasing prevalence of automotive and biomedical electronics. In recent years, several latch designs have been developed for SEU/SET protection, but each has its own issues regarding timing, area, and power. Therefore, we propose a novel soft-error mitigating latch design, called SEM-Latch, which extends QUATRO and incorporates a speed path whereas embedding a reference voltage generator (RVG) for simultaneously improving timing, area, and power in 45nm CMOS process. SEM-Latch effectively reduces the power, area, and PDAP (product of delay, area, and power) by an average of 1.4%, 12.5%, and 8.7%, respectively, in comparison to a previous latch (HPST) with equivalent SEU protection. Furthermore, in comparison to AMSER-Latch, SEM-Latch reduces area, timing overhead and PDAP by 27.2%, 48.2%, and 60.2%, respectively, to provide 99.9999% particle rejection rate for SET protection.