How reliable is your cell-phone? Actually, you don’t really care. It will crash from time to time due to software bugs and you’ll throw it away after two or three years. If a few phones also crash due to stray neutrons from outer space or stray alpha particles from the solder balls used in the flip-chip bonding then nobody… Read More
Tag: alpha particle
How to Blast Your Chip with High Energy Neutron Beams
So you want to know how reliable your chips are and how susceptible they are to single event effects (SEEs) where a neutron or an alpha particle causes a storage element (flop or memory cell) to flip in a way that alters the behavior of the device. There are two ways a particle hitting a device might not cause a problem. Firstly, the particle… Read More