Soft error susceptibility mapping of DRAMs using a high-energy nuclear microprobe

Abstract Soft errors in 16 Mbit dynamic random access memories (DRAMs) have been investigated using proton microprobes at 400 keV with a spot size of 1 × 1 μm 2 . The newly developed susceptibility mapping can reveal the correlation between the particle hit-position position and the susceptibility to soft errors in a DRAM. The cell-mode soft-errors were found to take place by the incidence of ions within 6 μm around a monitored cell. These errors would be induced by minority carrier diffusion in a lateral direction. This result manifests the possibility of multiple-bit errors by the incidence of an energetic particle.