Terrestrial cosmic ray intensities

Abstract

Cosmic rays may cause soft fails in electronic logic or memory. The IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 40, No. 1, discussed this complex event in detail. In order to predict electronic fail rates from cosmic particles, it is necessary to know the local cosmic ray flux. This paper reviews the penetration of cosmic rays through the earth's atmosphere, and the parameters which affect the terrestrial flux. The final particle flux is shown to vary mainly with the site's geomagnetic coordinates and its altitude. The paper describes in detail the quantitative cosmic flux at one datum (New York City) and then tabulates in an appendix the relative level at other major cities of the world.

Reliability-aware dynamic energy management in dependable embedded real-time systems

“…Transient faults that are caused by radiations in semiconductor circuits have been known and well studied since the late 1970s [44]. However, considering the various factors that affect the transient fault rate (such as cosmic ray flux, technology feature size, chip capacity, supply voltage and operating frequency), obtaining a 1 We note that this conclusion has been also reached by several research groups, though through different energy modeling techniques [8,11,17,13,28].…”

“…When supply voltage is scaled down, with smaller critical charges, lower energy particles could cause an error with a higher probability [44]). Considering the exponential term in Equation (4), and the fact that the number of low-energy particles is two magnitude higher than that of the high-energy particles [44], a more specific fault rate model for voltage scaling has been suggested in our previous study [41]:…”

“…Since the critical charge is proportional to system supply voltage [29], when system supply voltage is reduced, the critical charge decreases and low energy cosmic particles could cause an error. Considering the number of particles with lower energy is much more than that of particles with higher energy in the cosmic rays [44], scaling down voltages and frequencies for energy savings could lead to dramatically increased transient fault rates [41]. Therefore, voltage scaling has a severe effect on system reliability [9,31,41] and should be carefully evaluated before it is applied, especially for safety-critical embedded real-time applications, such as satellite and surveillance systems, where both high level of reliability and low energy consumption are important.…”

Terrestrial-Based Radiation Upsets: A Cautionary Tale

“…As neutron flux is location-dependent, we estimate the performance of these hardware components for a variety of locations, as listed in Table 1. We used a variety of methods to determine the neutron flux, including the JEDEC Standard [12], a Xilinx talk on neutron testing [11], and the cosmic ray intensities from IBM [28,8]. Note that there are several high altitude aircraft options, such as the U-2 and the ER-2, which operate in the 55,000-70,000 feet range [22,17].…”

Contribución a la validación de sistemas complejos tolerantes a fallos en la fase de diseño. Nuevos modelos de fallos y técnicas de inyección de fallos.

“…Sin embargo, por la disminución de la carga crítica en las tecnologías actuales, neutrones de baja energía (con mayor flujo que los de alta energía [Ziegler 1998]) también son capaces de provocar fallos, incrementando notablemente la tasa de fallo. Además, dado el cada vez más reducido tamaño de los modernos (y futuros) transistores, también se detecta un aumento de la probabilidad de que el impacto de un neutrón de alta energía ocasione fallos múltiples [Constantinescu 2002].…”