Abnormal increase in soft-error sensitivity of back-biased thin-BOX SOI SRAMs

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) SRAMs supported by a thin buried-oxide (BOX) film have been exposed to wide-range high-energy heavy ions for simulating terrestrial and galactic radiation impacts. Experimental results have demonstrated that a back-bias approach leads to a 100-times increase in their soft-error sensitivity compared to the counterpart zero-bias situation. This is attributed to that back biasing may enhance radiation-induced potential fluctuation under BOX, which may spread and cause multi-cell errors in the top SOI circuits via the capacitance coupling principle.