The Effect of Proton Energy on SEU Cross Section of a 16 Mbit TFT PMOS SRAM with DRAM Capacitors

Proton experimental data are analyzed for a 16-Mbit thin-film-transistor (TFT) PMOS static random access memory (SRAM) with DRAM capacitors. The presence of high-Z materials as tungsten causes an unusual increase of the single event upset (SEU) proton cross section for the energies above 100 MeV. Monte-Carlo simulations reproduce the experimentally measured cross sections up to 480 MeV and predict a further increase up to GeV energies. The implications of this increase are analyzed in the context of the LHC and other radiation environments where a significant fraction of the fluence lies above 100 MeV.