Novel High-Speed Radiation Hardened Sense Amplifier for SOI Based SONOS Memory

A high-speed radiation hardened sense amplifier for a SONOS type EEPROM memory is designed and realized in 0.6μm SOI process. Total dose radiation would cause large threshold voltage shifts of both memory cells and MOS transistors, hence degrades the performance of the sense amplifier. Compensation techniques for the sampling inverter and reference branch are proposed to achieve radiation hardness effectively. Furthermore, double branch precharge technique is developed to improve the read speed. As a result, the noise margin of the sampling inverter and the reference circuit in the proposed sense amplifier are not sensitive to threshold voltage shifts induced by the radiation. The simulation result shows that the sensing time of the proposed sense amplifier achieves only 9.16 ns, which is dramatically reduced by 27% compared with the single branch precharge technique.