Estimation of proton upset rates from heavy ion test data (ICs)

Single Event Upset energy dependence in a buck-converter power supply design

“…This mechanism has been recently found to be the dominant form of soft errors in 0.25 and 0.18 micron SRAM [17]. In the case of incident protons there are numerous nuclear reactions that can occur between the proton and silicon [19].…”

“…There are numerous nuclear reactions that can take place. There can be elastic collisions (producing a recoiling Si atom), the production of alpha or gamma particles and spallation reactions where the target is broken down into fragments [19]. Each particle produced can itself produce charge build-up through the processes described before.…”

Single event phenomena in atmospheric neutron environments

“…The choice of charge collection depth strongly affects the estimate of threshold energy for protonheutron SEU and the estimate of critical charge for heavy ion SEU. Rollins [14] used a depth of 5 pn for MOS technologies, and experimental measurements of charge deposition in NMOS SRAMs [15] indicate a charge collection depth of 13.6 p. When the effects of direct and diffusion charge collection and of charge funnelling [16, 171 are taken into account, a charge collection depth of 7-8 p would typically be expected for NMOS technologies. As can be seen in Table 4, the choice of different charge collection depths can-have opposite.…”

Correlation between proton and heavy-ion SEUs in commercial memory devices

“…In order to reduce the cost and time of SEU testing, several attempts have been made to estimate the cross-section and the threshold energies of proton SEU using heavy ion test data [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Rollins derived a relation between proton and heavy-ion SEU cross-sections [1]. Petersen found a simple relationship of proton and heavy-ion upset thresholds [2,3].…”

“…Among many other testing, Single Event Up-set (SEU) testing using energetic heavy-ions and protons is the most expensive and time consuming one. In order to reduce the cost and time of SEU testing, several attempts have been made to estimate the cross-section and the threshold energies of proton SEU using heavy ion test data [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Rollins derived a relation between proton and heavy-ion SEU cross-sections [1].…”