Soft Error Analysis and Optimizations of C-elements in Asynchronous Circuits

Control circuit in an asynchronous design is comprised mostly of Muller C-elements. Previous work has concentrated on power, performance, and area issues of various CMOS implementations of the C-element. In this paper we carried out a thorough soft error analysis of four popular CMOS implementations of the Muller C-element. It shows that SIL implementation has the best soft error resilience. Optimization techniques to improve the soft error resilience of C-elements are proposed. Results show 2x improvements in critical charge by using our techniques. Finally, analysis of power, performance, and area tradeoff is carried out for the optimized C-element.

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