Soft error failures in

SRAMs and DRAMs

SRAM and DRAM cell schematic
• errors in semiconductor memories –
– hard failures caused by permanent physical damage to
the devices
– soft errors caused by alpha particles or the ionizing
dose radiation environments.
• Single-bit read errors in a memory array

• Soft error is not a permanent error.

• A change in the logic stage of a storage element

such as a memory cell is also referred to as an
“upset”

• "error" and "upset“ used interchangeably in the

case of single-event induced logic state reversals
(eg. logic "I“ changing to a logic "0" and vice versa).
• soft errors can be caused by circuit-related
problems such as
– supply voltage fluctuations
– inadequate noise margins
– sense amplifier imbalance

the source of a particular failure mode was identified in

1978 by May and Woods as being the alpha particles.

In 1978, May and Woods identified alpha particles were

the cause of soft errors
 These alpha particles were produced by the decay of
trace amounts of uranium and thorium present in some
packaging material, causing random errors
 Soft Errors due to Alpha Particles

The "critical charge “Qc “ is

defined as the charge
differential between the logic
"I“and "0" states.

e-h pairs passing through

passivation layers are not
collected by the empty
potential well, some impact
energy is lost before
reaching the substrate

Logic state in which storage node is filled with minority-carrier charge(e-) is

designated as “0”

T. C. May and M. H. Woods, "A new physical mechanism for soft errors in
dynamic memories,“ in Proc. ReI. Phys. Symp.,Apr. 1978, pp. 2-9.
 Soft Errors due to Alpha Particles

e- reaching the depletion region

are swept by the electric field into
the well, whereas the holes are
repelled.

e- generated in the bulk that

diffuse to the edge of the well
are also collected by the storage
nodes.

S. Ando et al., "Comparison of DRAM cells in the simulation of soft error rates,"
presented at the 1990 IEEE Symp. VLSI Circuits.
 Charge deposited by an alpha-particle track, reaches the storage node
through drift and diffusion, does not alter the electrical state of node “0”. It may
upset state node holding “1”

 Soft error or an upset occurs when a large enough fraction of e- collected by

the potential well produces net charge > Qc
 DRAMs are susceptible to upset by charge collected through diffusion

 For high-density DRAMs, the probability of multi-bit errors caused by

an incidence of an alpha particle increases

The Soft-Error Rate (SER), expressed in number of errors per hours (or
per day), is a measure of the device susceptibility to soft errors.
 scaling the oxide thickness

 Dual di-electric films -such as Si3N4 and SiO2

 Various techniques to reduce soft-error :

 Entire array of NMOS DRAM cells was built in a p-

well, so that the well-substrate junction act as reflecting
barrier for the minority carriers produced outside the well,
prevents diffusion into unfilled storage wells.

 Heavily doped substrate and Lightly doped epitaxial

layers helps SER rates
• Advances have been made in storage cell
structures, such as trench capacitors and stacked
capacitor cells

• Trench capacitor structures with the storage

electrode inside the trench (also called inverted
trench cells) provided better SER rates than the
cells in which the storage electrode is outside the
trench.
 A paper was presented by Fujitsu making a comparison
between several types of trench and stacked capacitor
cell structures by simulating their soft-error rates.

A stacked capacitor cell was found more suitable for

high-density, megabit-level designs than a trench
capacitor cell.
 Another method to reduce SER has been the use of
thick coatings of radioactive contaminant- free polymer
material on the die surface of memory chips.

The purification of wafer fabrication materials and

improvements in packaging materials with a much
lower concentration of radioactive impurities has also
helped reduce soft-error problems.
• Use of redundancy through the on-chip Error-
Correcting Codes (ECC) has been implemented for
recovery from "soft errors" caused by alpha particles.

• However, in the natural space environments, the soft

errors may be caused by ionizing particles (such as
MeV-energy protons) trapped within the radiation
belts surrounding earth, or from heavy ion cosmic ray
fluxes.