Radiation Hardness Assurance Through System-Level Testing: Risk Acceptance, Facility Requirements, Test Methodology, and Data Exploitation

RADNEXT is an EU-funded network of irradiation facilities and radiation effects experts aimed at increasing the quantity and quality of user access to accelerator infrastructure, and improving the diversity and harmonization across facilities. Along with the beam provision to worldwide radiation effects users, RADNEXT has an ambitious research program oriented at improving radiation effects testing, of which an example of a heavy ion facility inter-comparison at very different energy regimes is included in this work. In particular, energy deposition distributions in a silicon solid-state detector and the Single Event Upset (SEU) and Multiple Cell Upset (MCU) behaviour are compared amongst heavy ion beams of similar LET, but very different energies (i.e., from the more classical ∼10 MeV/u regime up to several hundreds of MeV/u).

Section: Joint-research Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heavy Ion Energy Deposition and SEE Intercomparison Within the RADNEXT Irradiation Facility Network

Alía

Coronetti

Biłko

et al. 2023

“…For these reasons, system level testing should be regarded as a complement for component level tests or as a final verification step for complex devices whose subcomponents have been already tested separately. Overall, system level testing should not completely replace component level testing, but testing the most critical components individually and performing a final test at system level could be a good trade-off in terms of time, money and reliability [77].…”

Section: * X-rays Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Reduced Resolution Redundancy for Radiation Hardening in FPGA Designs

García-Astudillo

Lindoso

Entrena

et al. 2023

Reduced Precision Redundancy (RPR) is an alternative to Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) that reduces the area overhead at the expense of minor accuracy loss in case of error. In this work, we propose a Scaled RPR approach for multi-stage circuits and analyze the error mitigation tradeoffs. As case study, several Fast Fourier Transform designs were tested with low energy protons and fault injection. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves error mitigation with good accuracy, while significantly reducing the area overhead with respect to a full precision TMR approach. This chapter has been published as an article: [4]

“…Choosing to test the system using a duty cycle mode without properly selecting the correct facility can lead to test invalidation. The flux is an important parameter in this choice [24]. Testing using a pulsed beam is risky because it is possible that, using a realistic duty cycle, not all operating conditions will be tested correctly if there is no synchronization between system and beam.…”

Section: Functional and System Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing and Validation Methodology for a Radiation Monitoring System for Electronics in Particle Accelerators

Zimmaro

Ferraro

Boch

et al. 2022

Self Cite

In this work, a methodology for the design and validation of a radiation monitoring system for electronic systems in particle accelerators is presented. The methodology expands the common Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) procedure implemented at CERN, including new steps dedicated to both system-level testing, focused on a wireless device, and sensors characterization and readout validation. A case study demonstrating the validity of this methodology is proposed with the qualification of a novel battery-powered wireless radiation monitoring system. This system not only represents the validation vehicle of the methodology but also an innovation in terms of monitoring platform due to its flexibility and improved capabilities. The application of this methodology allowed its full qualification, providing useful data in terms of resistance to radiation, lifetime, and failure rate in operation, demonstrating the validity of the testing strategy proposed in the paper.