This article investigates the transient dose rate effect (TDRE) on the system-in-package (SiP) SZ0501 experimentally. A specialized program is designed for TDRE tests. With the increase of dose rates, the failure features of the SiP are recorded. Photocurrents on each power supply line are also measured to assist in analyzing SiP failures. In addition, both enabled and disabled programmable read-only memory (PROM) cases are considered to compare their discrepancies. The experimental results show that high frequency (HF) signals in the SiP are much sensitive to TDRE. Also, the logical resource in its field-programmable gate array (FPGA) presents a higher sensitivity than the clock resource, which is a contrary finding to the previous results. Besides, it is found that there seems to be a micro latch-up window in the SiP. Moreover, this SiP demonstrates different TDRE for enabled PROM and disabled PROM cases, and it has an automatic reconfiguration process in the case of enabled PROM. These findings are followed by a detailed analysis and discussion.

This article investigates the transient dose rate effect (TDRE) of two types of level-shifting transceivers. Experimental results show that both transceivers have a high latch-up threshold. One uncommon phenomenon is found that there are photocurrents generated at the input ports for both transceivers when exposed to transient $\gamma $ radiation. Moreover, the polarity and amplitude of the photocurrents are related to the input voltage level. A hypothesis is proposed that this uncommon phenomenon is caused by the electrostatic discharge (ESD) circuits at the input ports and then it is successfully verified by TCAD simulations. The simulation results show that the vertical parasitic p-n-p transistor in pMOS of the ESD circuit could turn on under transient $\gamma $ radiation, and generate a positive photocurrent when the input port is configured to high-level voltage. On the contrary, when the input port is configured to low-level voltage, its lateral parasitic p-n-p transistor in pMOS could turn on and generate a negative photocurrent. The amplitude of the positive photocurrent is obviously larger than the negative photocurrent due to different gains of the parasitic transistors. Simulation results also show the number of pMOSs in n-well has significant impacts on the amplitude of photocurrents.

This paper investigates transient dose-rate effect (TDRE) on a high-speed comparator (SB9696), combining both experimental and simulation methods. Experimental results show that this comparator has two main kinds of transient responses under pulsed gamma-ray environment. First, when the total dose per pulse is less than 54.9 rad(Si), only a short disturbance appears and recovers within several microseconds. Second, when the total dose is beyond 399.6 rad(Si), the comparator is shortly interrupted and then recovers to an under-voltage operation state after several microseconds, and the under-voltage state has a long duration before recovering to a normal working state, which is an uncommon phenomenon that has not been found previously for comparators. A hypothesis is proposed that the short disturbance or interrupt is mainly caused by local photocurrents in the differential structure of the comparator, while the long under-voltage operation state is related to the global photocurrent with a long duration. Lastly, they are successfully verified by SPICE simulations. Simulation results indicate that the short disturbance or interrupt exactly result from local photocurrents in the differential pairs of the comparator’s output module. And, due to the rail-span collapse effect as the global photocurrent flows through power supply lines, the effective supply voltage of the comparator would decrease, thus resulting in a long under-voltage operation state.

The reliability of nanoscale electronic systems is important in various applications. However, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to atmospheric neutrons. This research conducted spallation neutron irradiations on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 system on a chip using the China Spallation Neutron Source. The results were analyzed in combination with a Monte Carlo simulation to explore the impact of atmospheric neutrons on the single event effects of the target system on chip. Meanwhile, the contribution of thermal neutrons to the chip’s single event effect susceptibility was also assessed. It was found that absorbing thermal neutrons with a 2 mm Cd sheet can protect against the single event effect on the system on the chip by about 44.4%. The effects of B and Hf elements, inside the device, on a single event effect of the Xilinx Zynq-7000 system on chip were evaluated too. Additionally, it was discovered that ¹⁰B interacting with thermal neutrons was the primary cause of the thermal neutron-induced single event effect in the system on chip. Although Hf has a high neutron capture cross section, its presence does not significantly affect the sensitivity to single event effects. However, during atmospheric neutron irradiation, the presence of Hf increases the possibility of depositing the total dose in the tested chip.

To overcome the complexity and challenges of transient γ irradiation experiments, this paper adopted pulsed lasers to simulate the transient dose rate effect (TDRE) on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) field-programmable gate array (FPGA), taking advantage of good stability, low interference, high efficiency, and low cost. Three test programs were designed for the Virtex-5 XC5VSX95T FPGA, including one program used in previous transient γ irradiation experiments. Laser experiments involved a wide energy range, and recorded failure features of the device under test (DUT) and photocurrents on the power supplies. By comparing the results with transient γ irradiation experiments, it was demonstrated that pulsed lasers can be used to effectively simulate FPGA’s TDRE, showing consistent effect characteristics. Additionally, the sensitivity of the internal clock and logic resources of the FPGA was analyzed, finding that delaylocked loops (DLLs) have a high sensitivity and that disturbances in the logic resources could propagate. There are multiple factors affecting the internal sensitivities. Furthermore, like transient γ rays, high-intensity pulsed lasers would also induce dynamic reconfiguration of the FPGA, which was analyzed specifically. These research findings are important supplements to studying FPGA’s TDRE, and also demonstrate a significant prospect of using pulsed lasers to simulate the TDRE in very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits.

DDR5 SDRAM (Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory), as the latest generation in its family, is an outstanding candidate for future space applications, highlighting the importance of considering its radiation performance. In this paper, we investigated the protoninduced radiation effects on DDR5 Dual-Inline-Memory-Modules (DIMMs) for the first time. Consumer-grade DDR5 modules were tested, taking into account several factors, including proton energy, module vendors, and the specific Power Management Unit (PMU) on DDR5. The results provided the single-event effect (SEE) cross-section curve as a function of proton energy, and uncovered the sensitivity of different vendors and the PMU. Additionally, comparison tests between server-grade DDR4 and DDR5 modules were conducted to study the impacts of different generations, external ECC cases, and accumulated effects. Fault injection simulations were also conducted to identify potential causes for the observed patterns in the experiments with the existence of on-die ECC.