Cosmic ray neutron induced upsets as a major contributor to the soft error rate of current and future generation DRAMs

Abstract

The system soft error rate (SSER) of 4M/16M DRAMs has been shown to be dependent on the cosmic ray neutron flux. A simple model and accelerated soft error rate (ASER) measurements made with an intense, high energy neutron beam support this result. The model predicts that cosmic ray neutron induced soft errors will become important at the 64M DRAM generation and beyond. lighit charged particle (a,

An efficient technique to tolerate MBU faults in register file of embedded processors

“…When a high energy alpha or neutron particle strike a memory element of a digital system, the kinetic energy of the particle produces a track of electron-hole in the memory element which is known as Single Event Upset (SEU) [21] [22]. If the imposed energy is high enough, the value stored in the memory element flips from 0 to 1 and vice versa known as soft error [7] [8].…”

Parallelization and checkpointing of GPU applications through program transformation

“…Transient failures are caused by alphaparticles in the chip material, cosmic rays from space, or radiation from radioactive reactive atoms [42]. Transient failure rate is increased by the effects of transistor integration, with lower threshold voltages and capacitances, smaller charges (Q=CxV) are needed to flip a bit in memory or in the datapath or control logic [42,43]. Typically, a microprocessor has a Soft Error Rate (SER) of 4000 FIT 2 , where 50% affect the datapath and control logic, and 50%…”

Single event upset at ground level

“…However, use of the alpha source does not provide an accurate indication of the ground level upset rate as Lage [ 171 directly showed ' by comparing SSER and alpha-source ASER rates. Three other types of ASER testing have been proposed and used: a) proton beams to simulate neutron-induced upset (IBM, [118]), b) the WNR neutron spallation source at Los Alamos (TI [19] and Boeing [20]) and c) a 14 MeV neutron generator (used in conjunction with a calculational method by Boeing [21]).…”