Measurement of Single-Event Effects on a Large Number of Commercial DRAMs

To evaluate the characteristics of commercial memory devices for space use, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a Solid State Recorder (SSR) on the Mission Demonstration test Satellite-1 (MDS-1 or 'Tsubas') into geo-stationary transfer orbit (GTO) in February 2002. Passing through the radiation belt exposed the MDS-1 to severe radiation environment in every orbit. This flight experiment allowed the observation of Single-Event Upsets (SEU) and Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effect on a large number of stacked 64 Mbit Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAM). As a result, the actual SEU rates could be calculated, and the capabilities of two types of on-the-fly Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) mechanisms were confirmed. This paper presents the results of the space experiment of SSR, focusing especially on SEU analysis