Outstanding Conference Paper Award: 2019 IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference

Abstract

In this work, experimental results are presented on single-bit-upsets (SBU) and multiple-bit-upsets (MBU) on a 45 nm SOI SRAM. The upset cross-sections were obtained with accelerated testing using both protons and heavy ions. The proton upset cross-sections were obtained using proton energies ranging from 1 to 500 MeV and the heavy ion data were obtained using ions with effective linear energy transfer (LET) values from 0.6 to 100 . Overall, the SBU data on the 45 nm SOI SRAM showed upset cross-sections-per-bit that were very similar to the cross-sections-per-bit on a 65 nm SOI SRAM for both heavy ion and proton testing. This result continues a trend that has been observed with advanced SOI CMOS SRAMs. In contrast to the SBU data, the MBU data on the 45 nm SRAM showed significantly higher upset cross-sections relative to the 65 nm SRAM. The higher MBU cross-sections were also expected based upon the closer spacing of the nodes in adjacent cells. While the overall trends were anticipated, the major focus of the paper was to understand a diverse range of single event effects that were contributing to the measured upsets. As a function of the incident proton energy, both scattering events and direct ionization upsets were observed. The data also highlighted the unique upset results that are produced at a 90 degree tilt angle. The MBU data showed a very large dependence on the data stored in the SRAM. The data dependence was understood based upon the layout of the SRAM cells and the MBU upsets produced by strikes in common diffusion regions. A detailed analysis of the MBU data showed that almost all of the MBU events occurred in adjacent cells along the bit-lines of the array. This result is very important since the MBU events along the same bit-line will be effectively corrected by error-correctingcode (ECC) circuits. Thus, the higher overall MBU cross-sections that were observed with technology scaling are not a critical issue in SOI SRAMs that use ECC circuits. David F. Heidel received his B.S. degree in physics from Miami University in 1974, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from The Ohio State University in 1976 and 1980 respectively. In 1980, he joined IBM’s Research Division, at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, working on Josephson superconducting technology. Since