As semiconductor technology advances, radiative-particle-induced soft errors and power consumption are becoming major concerns for digital circuits in aerospace applications. Radiation hardening by design and magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) are widely employed to address these concerns. In this paper, a novel latch, called TNURML, that can completely recover from triple-node upsets (TNUs), is proposed. The embedded MTJs provide non-volatility and are compatible with traditional CMOS processes. The TNURML employs a TNU-recovery module as well as a pair of MTJs for backup and recovery operations. Extensive simulations demonstrate the excellent TNU-recovery capability and non-volatility of the TNURML latch at the cost of slightly increased area overhead. The proposed TNURML latch reduces 43.63% of delay and 48.23% of power on average when compared to the state-of-the-art latches.

The objective of this paper is to investigate potential of satellite C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) radar in monitoring sugarcane growth in southern China. This paper proposes a method to map sugarcane growing area and retrieve sugarcane leaf area index (LAI) in different growth stages using ENVISAT Advanced SAR (ASAR) alternating polarization HH/HV data. The temporal response of ASAR alternating polarization HH/HV data to sugarcane fields and sugarcane LAI was first analyzed in the study area. The analysis shows that sugarcane fields have increasing temporal radar response trend with sugarcane growth and ratio of ASAR HV to HH data has a better correlation with the increase of sugarcane LAI. A theoretical radiative transfer model was adopted to interpret the trend. Based on the temporal variation of the radar response of sugarcane fields, a method for mapping sugarcane planting area was developed using ASAR HH and HV polarization data at two acquisition dates with a certain classification accuracy. The empirical models were also established to estimate LAI of sugarcane using the HV/HH polarization ratio. The results suggest that C-band ASAR data appear promising in the development of an operational system for monitoring sugarcane growth in southern China.

This research letter presents preliminary results of mapping rice crop growth using ENVISAT advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) alternating polarization HH/HV data. Four ASAR HH/HV images were collected in the early rice-growth cycle in the test site in 2006, and the temporal response of ASAR data to the rice field was analyzed. The height and biomass of rice were measured during acquisition of ASAR data, and empirical relationships were established between the backscattering coefficient and these two parameters. Based on the temporal variation of the radar response, a method for mapping a rice growth area was developed using the combination of ASAR HH and HV polarization data between two acquisition dates. The results confirm that C-band SAR data have great potential in the development of an operational system for monitoring rice crop growth in Southern China.