Cosmic ray soft error rates of 16-Mb DRAM memory chips

Author

Ziegler, James F. ; Nelson, Martin E. ; Shell, James Dean ; Peterson, R. Jerry ; Gelderloos, Carl J. ; Muhlfeld, Hans P. ; Montrose, Charles J.

Author_Institution

IBM-Res., Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

Volume

33

Issue

2

fYear

1998

fDate

2/1/1998 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

246

Lastpage

252

Abstract

Manufactured 16-Mb DRAM memory chips use three different cell technologies for bit storage: stacked capacitors, trenches with internal charge, and trenches with external charge. We have measured the soft fail probability of 26 different 16-Mb chips produced by nine vendors to evaluate whether the different cell technologies have an impact on the chip soft error rate. This testing involved irradiation with neutrons, protons, and pions, the principle hadrons of terrestrial cosmic rays. The results show clear differences in soft-fail sensitivity, which appears to be related to the cell structure

Keywords

DRAM chips; error analysis; error statistics; failure analysis; fault diagnosis; integrated circuit measurement; integrated circuit reliability; integrated circuit testing; neutron effects; probability; proton effects; radiation effects; 16 Mbit; DRAM testing; cell technologies; cosmic ray soft error rates; dynamic RAM chips; external charge; hadrons; internal charge; irradiation; memory chips; neutrons; pions; protons; soft fail probability; stacked capacitors; terrestrial cosmic rays; trenches; Capacitors; Circuit testing; Dielectric substrates; Electrodes; Error analysis; FETs; Manufacturing; Neutrons; Protons; Semiconductor device measurement;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9200

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/4.658626

Filename

658626