We measured soft errors on two 8Gb DRAMs by neutron irradiation. The results showed that the soft error rates for both DRAMs were about 3 FIT/Gb. An SBU that can be corrected by ECC were rarely measured, while burst errors caused by soft errors on peripheral circuits become dominant. Burst errors cannot be corrected by conventional ECC. Thus the SEC (Single Error Correction) mandatory in DDR5 cannot recover soft errors.
We present TID radiation response test data of commercial multiplexers as part of the ESA CORHA study. The aim of the CORHA study is to investigate COTS components relevant for (1) the space industry in general and (2) nanosatellites and CubeSat applications in particular. The ESA CORHA study will use TID and SEE radiation test data as a basis for formulating an ad-hoc RHA approach for COTS components.
List of International Scientific Committee (ISC) and Organizing Committee (OC) are available in this pdf.
Location and temperature characteristics of micro-latchups at the 7-nm bulk FinFET technology are investigated through thermal images. Thermal images show that micro-latchups are induced at random locations when tap cells are placed evenly across the die. Inducing multiple micro-latchups on the die results in clustering of micro-latchups and significant increase in IC-level current and local temperature on the die. Micro-latchups become eliminated serially when the supply voltage is reduced but kept above the holding voltage. Subsequent increase in supply voltage reinitiates micro-latchups on the IC. Temperature within a micro-latchup region shows an increase from room temperature to as high as 140 °C. These results show clustering of micro-latchups are a serious reliability threat at the 7-nm FinFET node.
Single event effects testing of semiconductors for use in space and other radiation environments is an indispensable requirement for maximising reliability and mission lifetime. The available capacity at heavy ion facilities has been outstripped by demand and pulsed laser test systems offer a quicker and lower cost alternative for many situations. Examples where laser test systems are a better solution, such as part screening and product development, are defined and the benefits explained. SEREEL2 is a new laser test system that is reliable, stable and easy to use. Key elements of the system are described and test data presented. These data are compared with results obtained from other systems, demonstrating the effectiveness of SEREEL2. Used appropriately, laser test systems can improve development times, reduce costs and increase reliability.
Initial conclusions of a feasibility study for a low-cost, short-duration mission to measure the space environment whilst simultaneously measuring effects on components, testing mitigation strategies and giving flight heritage to new detectors and components.
We developed a domain-based isolation design flow for the mitigation of SEU effects on SRAM-based FPGAs. Fault injection experimental analysis on TMR circuits mapped on AP-SoC demonstrates an improvement of 44% versus traditional mitigation techniques.
A radiation monitor was designed to measure and correlate the radiation effects on sounding rockets. Two silicon PIN detectors with 4-quadrants and a Geiger counter with suitable readout electronics were qualified for space flight. Two of these radiation monitors were flown to an altitude of 136 km on top of the SR0.1 rockets launched by ROKETSAN™ on the 26 th and 29 th of October 2020 from Turkey. Count rates and corresponding dose rates were measured at the Regener-Pfotzer maximum as well as all through the flight path and monitored live in the control room through the telemetry downlink. An 11% difference in total dose was observed between the two flights.
The space environment is known to be the seat of radiation of different kinds to which satellites in orbit are subjected. These include cosmic rays that come from stars and radiation belts that come from the Earth's magnetic field. The impact of radiation on electronic components results in anomalies called "Single Event Effects" which can lead to the destruction of equipment. Various protection methods exist, like hardening of components or satellite shielding, but they are often costly and/or difficult to implement. This is why space designers try to circumvent these processes with an efficient software protection method. This paper reports a set of experiments based on machine learning tools that will provide the basis to design and develop an anomaly detection method for Single Event Effects. The data sets that were used are issued from emulated radiations obtained by laser tests on a SAM3X microcontroller, complemented by data obtained by simulation.
Stuck bits in SDRAM are reported in many different works. This failure mode can be critical for space applications as systematic errors on a same bit can generate a failure of the embedded ECC. Different commercial SDRAM were irradiated under protons at Paul Scherrer Institute in order to assess their sensitivity to stuck bits and determine the experimental conditions favorable to their occurrence. The objective of this work was also to identify the physical failure modes in recent SDRAM technologies and to observe the persistence of SHE and their annealing over time.
Estimating the soft error rate (SER) for processors is imperative to adopt a proper hardening technique for increasing the system reliability. Aiming to estimate the functional error rates, we propose to scale the baseline SER estimated with physical memory sizes by the fraction of architecturally correct execution (ACE) bits of memory elements (SRAM, caches and registers). We compared the scaled SER with the measured SER under neutron irradiation for a multi-core processor and confirmed a good consistency.
The article presents the results of singlt event effect (SEE) testing samples of various representatives of analog microcircuits: operational amplifiers (OpAmp), relays, voltage regulators and transistor.
We investigate pitch angle distributions in the inner radiation belt for L-shells between 2-2.5 REarth and in the equatorial regions with B/B 0 of <1.05. The data from the INTEGRAL Radiation Monitor (IREM) onboard ESA’s INTEGRAL satellite is analysed for the years from 2010-2014 and 2019-2020 during its descent into the proton belt during two solar minima. The Proton Telescope (PROTEL) onboard the CRRES mission (NASA, U.S. Department of Defense; 1990-1991) is used for comparison of the data in the same regions, divided into a pre-storm, storm and post-storm period. The channels used for this study are most susceptible to protons and least affected by electron contamination. The pitch angles of the instruments to the magnetic field is retrieved and their countrate dependence is investigated. The peak countrates are observed at around 90°for all investigated channels. For IREM, the fitted anisotropy factor (n) is larger (n=8-9) for the lower energy channel (>12 MeV) for the L-shell 2 - 2.25 R E and lower (n=2-4) for the higher energy channels (>43 MeV). For L-shell= 2.25-2.5 R E the anisotropy factors for the lower energy channel are also large (n=6-7) and for the higher energy channels low (n=2-6). Similar behaviour is found for the PROTEL data. In the low energy channel (>11 MeV) the highest anisotropy (n=5.5) is found. During the storm the anistropy increases to about 20 in the higher energy channels (>44 MeV) and stays elevated in the post-storm period.
ATLAS-TPX detectors were used to measure ionising dose and charged particle fluences in the ATLAS experiment. We present a study of the detector responses to the different particle species and compare measurements with Geant4 simulations.
7nm FinFET is the last technology proposed by Xilinx and also for the first Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP). It is the successor of the commonly used System on Chip (SoC) Zynq XC7Z030, and more recently the Zynq® Ultrascale+. The Newspace industry is continuously requiring more performance capability and a better figure of merit regarding volume, mass and consumption. For space applications, one of the key metric is the radiation hardness of such devices. It needs to be carefully considered, to avoid reliability issues, and bad performance about system availability. The 7nm FinFET technology has been then selected to manage these new challenges. This paper presents first the technology and its benefits. Then a description of the GANIL irradiation facility and the test bench developed to perform heavy ion SEE tests is described. The Xilinx Versal device preparation for heavy ion campaign is also explained. Results and observations about Single Event Latchups (SEL) and other events are also presented. Furthermore, a laser test to localize observed events under beam is also described.
We exploited the potential of radiation-induced emissions (RIEs) in the visible domain of a nitrogen-doped, silica-based, multimode optical fiber to monitor the very high dose rates associated with experiments at different pulsed X-ray facilities. We also tested this sensor at lower dose rates associated with steady-state X-ray irradiation machines (up to 100 keV photon energy, mean energy of 40 keV). For transient exposures, dedicated experimental campaigns were performed at ELSA (Electron et Laser, Source X et Applications) and ASTERIX facilities from CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique—France) to characterize the RIE of this fiber when exposed to X-ray pulses with durations of a few µs or ns. These facilities provide very large dose rates: in the order of MGy(SiO2)/s for the ELSA facility (up to 19 MeV photon energy) and GGy(SiO2)/s for the ASTERIX facility (up to 1 MeV). In both cases, the RIE intensities, mostly explained by the fiber radioluminescence (RIL) around 550 nm, with a contribution from Cerenkov at higher fluxes, linearly depend on the dose rates normalized to the pulse duration delivered by the facilities. By comparing these high dose rate results and those acquired under low-dose rate steady-state X-rays (only RIL was present), we showed that the RIE of this multimode optical fiber linearly depends on the dose rate over an ultra-wide dose rate range from 10−2 Gy(SiO2)/s to a few 109 Gy(SiO2)/s and photons with energy in the range from 40 keV to 19 MeV. These results demonstrate the high potential of this class of radiation monitors for beam monitoring at very high dose rates in a very large variety of facilities as future FLASH therapy facilities.
Microchip Radiation Tolerant (RT) PolarFire Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) fabric in orbit programming is investigated using Total Ionizing Dose (TID), Proton and Heavy ion in beam programming tests. In beam programming results show that in orbit programming can be achieved and programming must be followed by stand-alone verify to ensure programming success. Single Event Effect (SEE) characterization of the FPGA Fabric and Single Event Latchup (SEL) using heavy ion and proton are also presented.
An experimental study on the cell-to-cell sensitivity of 65-nm, 90-nm and 130-nm volatile bulk COTS SRAMs to thermal neutron irradiation is presented. Results show a dependency between V-DR and the number of bitflips after irradiation.
This paper computes the worst-case failure for serial UAV communication components based on the node technology and Linear Energy Transfer for the target FPGA. Furthermore, our framework implements priced timed automata models to execute the blind scrubbing technique and analyze UAV-UAV communication availability to obtain the optimal scrubbing intervals and scrubbing durations for Virtex-II and UltraScale Xilinx FPGA models.
This paper investigates the response of a commercial GaN-on-Si HEMT technology to laser testing parameters commonly used for single-photon absorption testing of silicon devices. Transient currents mappings and the influence of bias conditions are presented and discussed.
