Thermal neutron-induced soft-error rates for flip-flop designs in 16-nm bulk FinFET technology

Soft-error rates (SER) of Flip-Flop (FF) designs in a 16-nm bulk FinFET technology are characterized with thermal neutron, high-energy neutron and alpha particle irradiations. Results show that the contribution of thermal-neutron-induced SER can be higher or lower than alpha-particle-induced SER for different FF designs and can be comparable to high-energy-neutron-induced SER for some FF designs. The contribution of thermal-neutron-induced SER to overall SER can be significantly higher than previously reported.