Mechanisms of atmospheric neutron-induced single event upsets in nanometric SOI and bulk SRAM devices based on experiment-verified simulation tool**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11505033), the Science and Technology Research Project of Guangdong Province, China (Grant Nos. 2015B090901048 and 2017B090901068), and the Science and Technology Plan Project of Guangzhou, China (Grant No. 201707010186).

Abstract

In this paper, a simulation tool named the neutron-induced single event effect predictive platform (NSEEP2) is proposed to reveal the mechanism of atmospheric neutron-induced single event effect (SEE) in an electronic device, based on heavy-ion data and Monte-Carlo neutron transport simulation. The detailed metallization architecture and sensitive volume topology of a nanometric static random access memory (SRAM) device can be considered to calculate the real-time soft error rate (RTSER) in the applied environment accurately. The validity of this tool is verified by real-time experimental results. In addition, based on the NSEEP2, RTSERs of 90 nm–32 nm silicon on insulator (SOI) and bulk SRAM device under various ambient conditions are predicted and analyzed to evaluate the neutron SEE sensitivity and reveal the underlying mechanism. It is found that as the feature size shrinks, the change trends of neutron SEE sensitivity of bulk and SOI technologies are opposite, which can be attributed to the different MBU performances. The RTSER of bulk technology is always 2.8–64 times higher than that of SOI technology, depending on the technology node, solar activity, and flight height.