Soft Errors Induced by Energetic Protons

Two types of 4K dynamic RAM devices have been shown to exhibit soft errors when exposed to energetic protons. Considerable variation in sensitivity was found among devices, even those of the same model. For individual devices the soft error cross section increased with proton energy over the range of proton energies of from 18 to 130 MeV. The types of errors observed and their locations in memory were also found to depend on the beam energy.