TSAREME, a comprehensive tool in evaluating radiation hardness of submicron technologies

The model Total Space and Atmospheric Radiation Effects on Microelectronics (TSAREME) developed at Boeing was applied in evaluating the hardness of submicron integrated circuits (ICs) to space radiation causing single event effects (SEEs). TSAREME computed the Soft Error Rate (SER) as accurate as 6% to measured values of a 0.25 micron SRAM node in geosynchronous orbit. Results indicated that the SER can be overestimated by a factor of ~4 when only the active silicon volume (SV) is modeled, indicating that materials in components surrounding the SV absorb a large fraction (~3/4) of the ions. Also, analysis results indicated that the SER values at solar minimum increased by 60% when the contributions from secondary ions are included when only the SV was considered. When the entire node was modeled, the SERs increased by only 15% when secondary ions were included.