Impact Of Heavy-ion Irradiation Parameters On Single Event Effects In SRAM Devices

The space environment with heavy radiation, high-vacuum and inconstanttemperature has received wide concern owing to its potential threat to the reliability ofintegrated circuits and devices. This is essentially a new challenge to the ground-testexperiments for assessing the radiation effects on semiconductor devices.Consequently, in this work, using Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL)and Monte Carlo simulation, we have investigated the influence of irradiationparameters on single event effects (SEEs) in SRAM, such as temperature, supplyvoltage, data pattern and ionic characterization (species and energy).The commercial bulk SRAMs and silicon on insulator (SOI) SRAMs are selected asthe experimental objects of HIRFL ground-test. The temperature dependences ofsingle event upset (SEU) on these devices have studied and analyzed by experimentand Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that, for the commercial bulk SRAM,the obtained SEU cross-section is much sensitive to the temperature; for the SOISRAM, the corresponding SEU cross-sections presented a remarkable increased trendby incident12C ions but illustrated a steady trend by incident209Bi ions with increasingtemperature. Through Monte Carlo simulation, it is revealed that the engineeringmetric of linear energy transfer (LET) plays an important role in temperaturedependence. In detail, the temperature dependency is much relied on the value of LET and threshold LET. In addition, the current pulse of single event latchup (SEL) in bulkSRAM has been investigated in HIRFL by changing the irradiation parameters(including angle of incident ion, supply voltage and data pattern). It is revealed that thedistribution of peak of SEL’s current is much dependence on the angle of incident ionand supple voltage except data pattern. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we have furtherexplored the influence of ionic characterization (species and energy) on SEUoccurrence. The simulated results show that, the contribution of nuclear reactions onSEU cross section has much related to ion energy (or LET) and the relationshipbetween ion energy and SEU cross section presented a non-linear trend.In conclusion, with the integration of the experiments in HIRFL and Monte Carlosimulation, the impact of irradiation parameters on SEEs in SRAMs have been widelyand deep studied. According to the above mentioned results, it is suggested that, theirradiation parameters (including temperature and ionic characterization) should betaken into account during ground-test in semiconductor devices.