Altitude SEE Test European Platform (ASTEP) and First Results in CMOS 130 nm SRAM

Soft errors induced by natural radiation at ground level in floating gate flash memories

“…Despite the duration of the experiment (18 months) and the huge quantity of data to manipulate (the individual V T evolution of more than 50 Gbits of memory cells has been stored and processed), the statistics of this first experiment remains relatively weak because of the extremely low rate of cell flips in this kind of memory. Nevertheless, the remarkable convergence of the experimental results and our numerical simulations (considering no fitting parameter in the complete simulation chain) for the neutron-SER indicates that this later value is more than two decades below the soft error rate usually measured in modern SRAMs [10,[21][22]. In the same way, the comparison of experimental data measured at sea-level and alpha-SER simulations clearly suggests that another mechanism than internal alpha-particle production in bulk materials may be responsible of charge loss from floating gates.…”

Soft-errors induced by terrestrial neutrons and natural alpha-particle emitters in advanced memory circuits at ground level

“…ASTEP is a permanent installation and a dual academic research/R&D platform founded by STMicroelectronics, JB R&D and L2MP-CNRS in 2004 [12]. The platform is referenced as a research location in the international JEDEC standard JESD89A [18] and is currently operated by IM2NP-CNRS (formerly L2MP).…”

“…In this context, the present work surveys our 2005-2010 experiments and modeling-simulation works [12][13][14][15][16][17] dedicated to the evaluation of natural radiation-induced soft errors in advanced static memory (SRAM) technologies following a real-time (i.e. life testing) approach.…”

A Portable Low-Cost SEU Evaluation Board for SRAMs

“…Field tests' results speed up if the experiments are performed in high altitude facilities, such as the Mauna Loa [11] or the French Bures' Peak [12].…”