Dependence of single event upsets sensitivity of low energy proton on test factors in 65 nm SRAM

In order to accurately predict the single event upsets (SEU) rate of on-orbit proton, the influence of the proton energy distribution, incident angle, supply voltage, and test pattern on the height, width, and position of SEU peak of low energy protons (LEP) in 65 nm static random access memory (SRAM) are quantitatively evaluated and analyzed based on LEP testing data and Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that different initial proton energies used to degrade the beam energy will bring about the difference in the energy distribution of average proton energy at the surface and sensitive region of the device under test (DUT), which further leads to significant differences including the height of SEU peak and the threshold energy of SEU. Using the lowest initial proton energy is extremely important for SEU testing with low energy protons. The proton energy corresponding to the SEU peak shifts to higher average proton energies with the increase of the tilt angle, and the SEU peaks also increase significantly. The reduction of supply voltage lowers the critical charge of SEU, leading to the increase of LEP SEU cross section. For standard 6-transitor SRAM with bit-interleaving technology, SEU peak does not show clear dependence on three test patterns of logical checkerboard 55H, all “1”, and all “0”. It should be noted that all the SEUs in 65 nm SRAM are single cell upset in LEP testing due to proton's low linear energy transfer (LET) value.