INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE FAILURE TOLERANCE OF ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF INDIVIDUAL PARTICLES

A pressing issue today is to ensure fault tolerance in control systems operating under conditions of high-energy particle impact, such as cosmic radiation, consisting mainly of protons with energies up to  eV. There are quite a few such particles, but as a result of interaction with matter they produce neutrons, some of which, as a result of elastic collisions with silicon atoms (the main component of a modern microcircuit), produce primarily knocked-out atoms (PKAs) of sufficient energy to generate electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor, and they, acting on a working transistor, can cause a failure in the operation of the entire device. It is immediately clear that theoretical calculations here are greatly complicated by the complexity of the processes described above, and therefore experiments with real irradiation and measurement of the number of failures are needed. In this work, fault tolerance is experimentally investigated when an integrated circuit is exposed to Pu-Be source neutrons with an average energy of about 3.8 MeV. An experimental setup is developed that records the number of faults in the circuit when irradiated. The possibility of increasing the fault tolerance of FPGA circuits by using redundancy (spatial and temporal triplication) is demonstrated

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