Evaluating a radiation monitor for mixed-field environments based on SRAM technology

Abstract

Instruments operating in particle accelerators and colliders are exposed to radiations that are composed of particles of different types and energies. Several of these instruments often embed devices that are not hardened against radiation effects. Thus, there is a strong need for monitoring the levels of radiation inside the mixed-field radiation areas, throughout different positions. Different metrics exist for measuring the radiation damage induced to electronic devices, such as the Total Ionizing Dose (TID), the Displacement Damage (DD) and of course the fluence of particles for estimating the error rates of the electronic devices among other applications. In this paper, we propose an SRAM based monitor, that is used to define the fluence of High Energy Hadrons (HEH) by detecting Single Event Upsets in the memory array. We evaluated the device by testing it inside the H4IRRAD area of CERN, a test area that reproduces the radiation conditions inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel and its shielded areas. By using stability estimation methods and presenting experimental data, we prove that this device is proper to be used for such a purpose.

A Fault-Tolerant Reconfigurable Platform for Communication Modules of Satellites

“…To monitor the radiation levels that affect the printed circuit board (PCB), this platform adopts SRAM memories as single events sensors. Experiments with this technique have already been performed [14]. The number of ionizing particles that reached the memory may be expressed by a constant multiplied by the number of detected events.…”

Soft errors in commercial off-the-shelf static random access memories

“…The LHC environment is a mixed field composed of several particles such as hadrons (protons, pions, kaons, and neutrons), photons, electrons, and muons, with energies ranging from thermal levels (< 1 MeV) to the GeV scale. The research in [32] integrated SRAM devices as SEU collectors in a LHC-like environment. These SEUs were then used to estimate the intensity of High-Energy Hadrons (HEH) fluence.…”

“…Radiation levels inside the H4IRRAD zones were measured using the LHC radiation monitoring system (RadMon) [34] and simulated using the FLUKA code [35,36]. Below, we briefly present the results from the characterization and testing of the monitor proposed in [32]. The monitors are made of boards embedding three identical 90 nm SRAMs.…”