Elsevier

Microelectronics Reliability

Volume 71, April 2017, Pages 65-70
Microelectronics Reliability

Single event effects sensitivity of low energy proton in Xilinx Zynq-7010 system-on chip

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.microrel.2017.02.014Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Investigate the single event effects sensitivity of Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC by the low-energy protons

  • Describes the dynamic testing methods for different blocks of Zynq-7010 SoC in detail

  • Obtain the SEE cross section curve for different energy protons

Abstract

In this paper, experimental methods are emphatically described for measuring the proton single event effects (SEE) in Xilinx Zynq-7010 system-on chip. Experimental data are presented showing that low energy (3 MeV  Energy  10 MeV) proton irradiation can cause single event effects in different hardware blocks of Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC, including D-Cache, programmable logic (PL), arithmetic logical unit (ALU), float point unit (FPU) and direct memory access (DMA). Moreover, the sensitivities of different hardware blocks to single event effects are different. Finally, the Stopping and Range of Ions in Matter (SRIM) software calculations show the possible reasons for this difference.

Introduction

Because of its small size, great functionality, low power consumption and other useful features, system-on chip (SoC) is widely used in many fields, including mobile communication, control system and aerospace. In particular, SoC is very attractive to the aerospace sector, because it helps the system integration, and miniaturization. However, as feature size and operating voltage decrease, SoC is becoming more susceptible to single event effects (SEE) [1].Single event effects are induced by the interaction of an ionizing particle with the sensitive regions of microelectronic device. Ionizing particles can be protons, heavy ions, and neutrons [2].

Protons are very important part in the space environment and arise from Van Allen radiation belts, solar events (solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections) and galactic cosmic rays [3]. The Van Allen radiation belts have two radiation belts, which predominantly consist of electrons and protons. The energy ranges commonly encountered go from some keV up to some tens or even hundreds of MeV. The Galactic Cosmic Rays comprise 85% protons, 14% alpha particles, and 1% heavy ions [4], [5]. Therefore, the SEE induced by proton has caused a serious impact on the electronic systems in space, especially for the low-energy protons at radiation belts in nanometer-scale integrated circuits. A lot of SEE experiments induced by protons have been performed, including static random access memory (SRAM) [6], [7], [8], [9]. However, a few experiments and researches about proton SEE in SoC have been done, particularly when the microelectronics enters the nanometer technology node. For example, Boeing Maestro ITC [10] and Freescale P2020 & P5020 [11] have been performed through high energy protons. For Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC, a single event upset experiment by high-energy protons was carried out and it mainly concentrated on the SEU in the memory elements, such as on-chip memory and L2 Cache [12]. However, the response of the other blocks to protons is also important in 28 nm technology node.

In this work, low energy proton experiments (3 MeV  E  10 MeV) using the dynamic testing methods were performed to characterize the SEE sensitivity of D-Cache, programmable logic (PL), arithmetic logical unit (ALU), float point unit (FPU) and direct memory access (DMA) in the Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC. Moreover, the SEE cross sections of different blocks under test were obtained.

Section snippets

Device under test

The Xilinx Zynq-7010 All Programmable SoC was used to perform this proton experiment. The SoC system integrates processing system (PS) and Xilinx programmable logic (PL) in a single chip, which is fabricated with 28 nm technology node. The Fig.1 shows the structure of Xilinx Zynq-7010 all programmable SoC. The PS includes ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs, 252 KB on-chip memory, 512 KB L2 Cache, 32 KB L1 D-Cache and I-Cache, DMA controller, Timers, watchdog, and various peripheral interfaces. The PL is derived

Experimental result

In this section, the experiment results for different blocks of SoC have been summarized. The number of SEE events for tested blocks and the cross sections are given. The SEE cross section is calculated by summing SEE events and fluence at each energy for the specific block [20]. The cross section σ is calculated as shown in Eq. (1).σ=NFwhere N is the number of events, F is the fluence in particles/cm2. The proton beam fluxes were 2.496 × 108 p/cm2 s at 3 MeV, 2.08 × 108 p/cm2 s at 5 MeV, and 2.76 × 10 p/cm2

Single event sensitivity for the D-Cache

The critical charge (Qcrit) is defined as the minimum charge which is needed to upset the state of latch or memory cell. Moreover, the critical charges of the sequential nodes approximately scale according to.QcritVccCwhere Vcc equals the power supply voltage, and C denotes the node capacitance [23], [25]. Hence, Qcrit is also expected to decrease with the decreasing of technology scaling. Moreover, if the collected charge is equal or larger than Qcrit, an upset is occurred. According to the

Conclusion

The SEE experiments of Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC were performed to investigate the SEE susceptibility of different blocks using low-energy protons based on dynamic testing methods. The dynamic cross sections of different blocks in different energies protons were calculated. The experimental results have revealed the PL and D-Cache were more sensitive than the other blocks and easily susceptible to SEE. Moreover, the charge curve of cross sections versus proton energy for D-Cache is different from

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 11175139), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 11575138), and the Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 11235008).

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