Compact Modeling and Simulation of Heavy Ion Induced Soft Error Rate in Space Environment: Principles and Validation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple physical model for predicting ion-induced soft error rates in space environments, validated against on-board data, emphasizing the importance of nonlocal ion impact effects in highly scaled memories.

Contribution

It presents a novel, validated physical model for soft error rate prediction that requires no fitting parameters and accounts for nonlocal ion impact effects in scaled memories.

Findings

Model accurately predicts soft error rates using only cross section and LET spectra.

Nonlocality of ion impact is crucial in highly scaled memory error mechanisms.

Predictions correlate well with on-board data without fitting parameters.

Abstract

A simple physical model for calculation of the ion-induced soft error rate in space environment has been proposed, based on the phenomenological cross section notion. Proposed numerical procedure is adapted to the multiple cell upset characterization in highly scaled memories. Nonlocality of the ion impact has been revealed as the key concept determining the difference between physical processes in low scaled and highly scaled memories. The model has been validated by comparison between the simulation results and the literature on-board data. It was shown that proposed method provides single-valued prediction results correlating well with on-board data based solely on cross section data and LET spectra without any hidden fitting parameters and procedures.