Experimental study on reactor neutron induced effect of deep sub-micron CMOS static random access memory

This paper investigates neutron irradiation effects of two kinds of commercial CMOS SRAM (static random access memory), of which one is 4M memory with the feature size of 0.25 μm and the other is 16M memory with the feature size of 0.13 μm. We designed a memory testing system of irradiation effects and performed the neutron irradiation experiment using the Xi'an Pulse Reactor. The upset of two kinds of memory cells did not present a threshold versus the increase of neutron fluence. The results showed that deep sub-micron SRAM behaved single-event upset (SEU) effect in neutron irradiation environment. The SEU effect of SRAM with smaller size and higher integrated level tends to upset is considered to be related to the reduction of the device feature size, and fewer charges for upsets of the memory cell also lead to the SEU effect. (authors)