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 MetalOxide Semiconductor (CMOS) and Fin FieldEffect Transistor (FinFET) and two logics: Complementary Logic (CMOS logic) and PassTransistor 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, FinFETbased circuits are about three times more robust than CMOS technology, with an improvement on the LET threshold for both logic families evaluated.

FinFET Variability and Nearthreshold operation: Impact on Full Adders design using XOR Blocks Near threshold operation reaches good results to energy critical applications. However, it introduces a considerable degradation on delay. Moreover, considering nanoeffects, circuits operating at nearthreshold are more sensitive to process variability. This paper analysis 9 full adders built with internal blocks that contain different combinations of 3 XOR logic circuits operating with nominal and nearthreshold voltages under process variability effects. The experiments adopt the 7nm FinFET ASAP technology. The nearthreshold operation can reduce on 97% the maximum power consumption and 65% the total energy, with an impact of about 10 times on delay. Considering process variability impact on energy and delay, the nearthreshold operation turns the circuits about 1.6 and 4 times more sensitive in the critical cases, respectively. Compared with traditional full adders, the proposed circuits can improve around 15% of the delay with similar power results. The results provide valuable data and show how the impact of variability and nearthreshold operation are important factors that must be analyzed to design more robust and low power circuits.