A Review of Single-Event Upset-Rate Calculation Methods

This article implements rate-calculation methods in the open literature and evaluates each of them by comparing the calculated results to the upset rates observed on-orbit for missions from 1987 to the present-day. Within the radiation effects community, the upset rates are typically calculated to give a worst-case result. Keeping this in mind, the models are optimized to provide the greatest precision while still over-estimating the rate in 90% of the datasets. The results indicate that a number of simple models that approximate the device data and environment do a good job in calculating the upset rate. Further, more complicated methods are not necessarily better and produce calculations with wider error bars and be more likely to underestimate the rate. In all cases, the implementation of the model is as important as the models used.