Impact of Spacecraft Shielding on Direct Ionization Soft Error Rates for Sub-130 nm Technologies

Abstract

Fig. 1: SiO2 sensitive volume (called SV1 in Table I) soft error rate relationships for several different space environments behind 2.5 mm of solid aluminum spherical shielding. All environments are derived from CRÈME96 with the exception of trapped protons and PSYCHIC. The deposited energy becomes the critical energy once a bin is chosen and the rate evaluated. The symbols are sparse to aid viewing -there are 240 bins per trace. The rate curve family for the silicon sensitive volume (called SV2 in Table I) is similar. Note that the PSYCHIC and trapped proton environments are cumulative fluences that were scaled by the inverse of the integration period to convert them to average rates.Abstract-We use ray tracing software to model various levels of spacecraft shielding complexity and energy deposition pulse height analysis to study how it affects the direct ionization soft error rate of microelectronic components in space. The analysis incorporates the galactic cosmic ray background, trapped proton, and solar heavy ion environments as well as the October 1989 and July 2000 solar particle events.Index Terms-soft error rate, direct ionization, radiation transport, space environment.

Availability analysis for satellite data processing systems based on SRAM FPGAs

“…All fluxes are averaged over 100 orbits and thus take any anomalies into account. We followed common practice and assumed 100 mil of solid spherical aluminium shielding, although it was shown in the past that this assumption is an underestimation for most spacecraft electronics boxes [24]. Two missions of the European Space Agency (ESA) are considered for the case study: Sentinel-3 (LEO, 814.5 km altitude, 98.65…”

Test methodology of a new upset mechanism induced by protons in deep sub-micron devices

“…Even if direct ionization of protons can have a major impact on the error rate [5,6], it is not an easy task to accurately measure the device sensitivity under a proton beam. In fact, the domain of proton energies for which sufficient direct ionization occurs is narrow and the range of the low energy protons in silicon is limited to a few micrometers (see Fig.…”

“…Therefore, the direct ionization could significantly impact the error rate in space environments for which the proton flux can be high [5,6]. As an example, space applications may demonstrate a 10-time increase in the soft error rate produced by protons behind a 100-mil aluminum shield, soft errors rate decreasing with increasing shielding [2].…”

Proton Direct Ionization in Sub-Micron Technologies: Numerical Method for RPP Parameter Extraction

“…The impact of proton direct ionization (PDI) on the single event upset (SEU) cross sections of highly-scaled submicron technology has been demonstrated in [1]- [12], among others. Therefore, it is of great importance to consider the contribution of low energy protons (LEP) (E p + < 3M eV ) to the on-orbit soft error rate (SER) [1]- [7], [13]. Also the impact of LEP PDI effects on the SER in avionics have been shown [14].…”