Single event upset vulnerability of selected 4K and 16K CMOS static RAM's

Upset thresholds for bulk CMOS and CMOS/SOS RAMS were deduced after bombardment of the devices with 140 MeV Kr, 160 MeV Ar, and 33 MeV O beams in a cyclotron. The trials were performed to test prototype devices intended for space applications, to relate feature size to the critical upset charge, and to check the validity of computer simulation models. The tests were run on 4 and 1 K memory cells with 6 transistors, in either hardened or unhardened configurations. The upset cross sections were calculated to determine the critical charge for upset from the soft errors observed in the irradiated cells. Computer simulations of the critical charge were found to deviate from the experimentally observed variation of the critical charge as the square of the feature size. Modeled values of series resistors decoupling the inverter pairs of memory cells showed that above some minimum resistance value a small increase in resistance produces a large increase in the critical charge, which the experimental data showed to be of questionable validity unless the value is made dependent on the maximum allowed read-write time.