How Resistant to Neutrons Are Your Storage Elements?

How Resistant to Neutrons Are Your Storage Elements?
by Paul McLellan on 08-13-2013 at 1:01 pm

There are two ways to see how resistant your designs are to single-event errors (SEE). One is to take the chip or even the entire system and put it in a neutron beam and measure how many problems occur in this extreme environment. While that may be a necessary part of qualification in some very high reliability situations, it is also … Read More


System Reliability Audits

System Reliability Audits
by Paul McLellan on 07-25-2013 at 12:09 pm

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


How to Blast Your Chip with High Energy Neutron Beams

How to Blast Your Chip with High Energy Neutron Beams
by Paul McLellan on 05-06-2013 at 3:49 pm

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