Influence of Randomness During the Interpretation of Results From Single-Event Experiments on SRAMs

After having carried out radiation experiments on memories, the detected bitflips must be classified into single bit upsets and multiple events to calculate the cross sections of different phenomena. There are some accepted procedures to determine if two bitflips are related. However, if there are enough bitflips, it is possible that unrelated pairs of errors appear in nearby cells and they are erroneously taken as a multiple event. In this paper, radiation experiments are studied as a special case of the urn-and-balls problem in probability theory to estimate how the measured multiple-event cross sections must be corrected to remove the overestimation due to the false events.