Heavy-ion and pulsed-laser single event effects in 130-nm CMOS-based thin/thick gate oxide anti-fuse PROMs

Single event effects of 1-T structure programmable read-only memory (PROM) devices fabricated with a 130-nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor-based thin/thick gate oxide anti-fuse process were investigated using heavy ions and a picosecond pulsed laser. The cross sections of a single event upset (SEU) for radiation-hardened PROMs were measured using a linear energy transfer (LET) ranging from 9.2 to 95.6 MeV cm2 mg−1. The result indicated that the LET threshold for a dynamic bit upset was ~ 9 MeV cm2 mg−1, which was lower than the threshold of ~ 20 MeV cm2 mg−1 for an address counter upset owing to the additional triple modular redundancy structure present in the latch. In addition, a slight hard error was observed in the anti-fuse structure when employing 209Bi ions with extremely high LET values (~ 91.6 MeV cm2 mg−1) and large ion fluence (~ 1 × 108 ions cm−2). To identify the detailed sensitive position of a SEU in PROMs, a pulsed laser with a 5-μm beam spot was used to scan the entire surface of the device. This revealed that the upset occurred in the peripheral circuits of the internal power source and I/O pairs rather than in the internal latches and buffers. This was subsequently confirmed by a 181Ta experiment. Based on the experimental data and a rectangular parallelepiped model of the sensitive volume, the space error rates for the used PROMs were calculated using the CREME-96 prediction tool. The results showed that this type of PROM was suitable for specific space applications, even in the geosynchronous orbit.