Qualitative Risk Assessment in the Application of Circuit-based Protection Against SEL in Space Electronics

The article considers the peculiarities of single event latch-up (SEL) in microelectronic devices under space high-energy particles irradiation and shows the limitations and risks of the usage of circuit-based SEL protection in space electronics. Different parameters of multiple thyristor structures in common IC chip and fixed threshold current of SEL suppressor circuit lead to a possibility not to detect some of many SEL events under ion irradiation and increase the risk of hard error due to SEL. Several salvations of this problem are discussed in the paper.