Radiation pre-screening of 4 Mbit dynamic random access memories for space application

The authors present the results of a radiation pre-screening program carried out on eleven types of commercially available 4 Mbit DRAMs. This evaluation program covered total ionising dose and Single Event Upset/Latch-up (SEU/SEL) testing. The Cobalt-60 irradiation facility at ESTEC was used for the creation of the total ionising dose data and SEU/SEL data are presented using Californium-252, accelerator heavy ion and proton irradiation. The ESTEC `CASE´ facility was used for the verification of test hardware/software and to produce initial SEU/SEL cross section data. Further heavy ion testing was carried out covering a Linear Energy Transfer (LET) range of 0.6 to 54.0 MeV/(mg/cm2). Proton testing was carried out using energies of 30, 50, 100, 200 and 500 MeV. Details of these tests including test strategy, the memory tester used, test facilities and memory details are provided