Single-Event Upsets and Multiple-Bit Upsets on a 45 nm SOI SRAM

Time exceedances for high intensity solar proton fluxes

“…Thus, while the October 1989 event is often a suitable choice as a worst case situation, this may not always be true. For example, some highly scaled technologies are susceptible to single event upset by protons close to their end of range [14]. For this situation one of the events that occurred in the year 2000 would represent a worst case flux.…”

Practicality of evaluating soft errors in commercial sub-90 nm CMOS for space applications

“…For scaled, sensitive COTS parts, protons are able to generate enough charge through electronic stopping, called direct ionization, to cause soft errors. K. P. Rodbell et al [1] and D. F. Heidel et al [2] published the first demonstration of low-energy proton direct ionization soft errors in 2007 and 2008 for a commercial 65 nm silicon-oninsulator (SOI) CMOS process; the results from D. F. Heidel et al [3] are shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…LET is often referred to as mass stopping power. It is the electronic stopping power, dE/dx, normalized by the density of the target material, which is either given as g/cm 3 or mg/cm 3 . LET is, by definition, a measure of direct ionization.…”

“…The spacecraft shielding distribution will determine which portion of the external proton energy spectrum becomes the low-energy spectrum that impacts sensitive microelectronic devices [2]. Low-energy protons have thus far been defined as protons with a kinetic energy less than 10 MeV, though energies that result in soft errors are typically below 2 MeV for the 65 and 45 nm process technologies documented thus far [1][2][3][4]. To be published in the 2010 International Reliability Physics Symposium conference proceedings.…”

“…This is particularly true for commercial off the shelf (COTS) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) parts. While these parts enable improved scientific investigations, evaluating the semiconductor technologies required for the missions creates unique testing challenges like the examination of low-energy proton-induced soft errors [1][2][3][4].…”