A comparison of heavy ion induced single event upset susceptibility in unhardened 6T/SRAM and hardened ADE/SRAM

Abstract

Single event upset (SEU) susceptibility of unhardened 6T/SRAM and hardened active delay element (ADE)/SRAM, fabricated with 0.35μm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS technology, was investigated at heavy ion accelerator. The mechanisms were revealed by the laser irradiation and resistor-capacitor hardened techniques. Compared with conventional 6T/SRAM, the hardened ADE/SRAM exhibited higher tolerance to heavy ion irradiation, with an increase of about 80% in the LET threshold and a decrease of ∼64% in the limiting upset cross-section. Moreover, different probabilities between 0→1 and 1→0 transitions were observed, which were attributed to the specific architecture of ADE/SRAM memory cell. Consequently, the radiation-hardened technology can be an attractive alternative to the SEU tolerance of the device-level.