Impact of device scaling and material composition on the soft error rates in avionic systems

The soft error rate (SER) of CMOS device models due to atmospheric neutrons for technologies between 1992 and 2011 were computed at various altitudes and latitudes. Model predictions of the SER for 350 and 600 nm CMOS representative of 1992 and 1994 were 1.8 and 3 upsets per day. Predictions of 9.8 and 11.6 upsets per day were made for 100 and 50 nm CMOS devices representing the technologies of 2005 and 2011. These observations taken together indicated that the SER slowly increased with decreasing feature size at a rate less than linear for sizes below 100 nm.