Real-time Soft-Error testing of 40nm SRAMs

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.…”

“…Two different radiation environments have thus been considered: the first one at sea-level in Rousset for reference and the second one in altitude on the ASTEP platform. The two sites are characterized by a relative atmospheric neutron flux of 1.04 and 6.02 with respect to New-York City, respectively [9][10]. After a period of exposition of several months, the wafers stored on ASTEP have been delivered to ST-Rousset for complete electrical characterization.…”

Robustness of hardware-oriented restricted Boltzmann machines in deep belief networks for reliable processing

“…Soft errors are one of the major concerns in the reliability of large-scale integrations. Understanding the failure modes and quantifying the error rate under natural radiation are primarily crucial for the development of high-density static random access memories (SRAMs), [19]. As a main memory of large-scale computing systems, dynamic random access memories (DRAMs) have been widely used, and have shown a remarkable reliability from the appllication point of view, though mostly owing to the implementation of redundancy and error correction coding (ECC).…”

“…Consequently, robustness to memory errors is expected in embedded and safety-critical applications which will make use future memory generations subjected to expectedly decreasing fabrication yield. Robustness to memory errors is also a factor of cost reduction by enabling low redundancy of memory at the integrated circuit and system levels [18,19].…”

Radiation and COTS at ground level

“…This method is called "real-time" soft error rate (RTSER) test [25][26][27] or unaccelerated testing. In this method, as in accelerated testing, the intensity of the natural radiation can be increased by deploying the test in altitude (at least for neutrons).…”