Low energy proton induced single event upset in 65 nm DDR and QDR commercial SRAMs

Abstract The single event upset (SEU) response of 65 nm commercial double data rate static random access memory (SRAM) and quad data rate SRAM was investigated by using proton beams with energies in the range of 0.15 MeV to 8.0 MeV. Experimental results show that a significant number of SEU occurrences can be triggered when the energy of incident proton is below 1 MeV. For the low energy protons, the SEU cross section measured in these SRAMs was found to increase with increasing proton energy, attaining a peak value, and then decreases as the proton energy was further increased. While in case of quad data rate SRAMs, it seems that they are more sensitive to SEU occurrences as compared with double data rate SRAMs. The bias voltage and data pattern dependence on SEU cross section induced by the low energy protons were also investigated in this work. In addition, the over-layer thickness of the SRAMs and the impact of degrader use in proton induced SEU test were also analyzed in detail. Monte Carlo simulations results indicate that the use of degrader in case of low energy proton induced SEU test results in a significant reduction of the SEU cross section.