Single event upset immunity of strontium bismuth tantalate ferroelectric memories

An embedded 1 Kbit nonvolatile (NV) serial memory manufactured with strontium bismuth tantalate (SBT) ferroelectric (FE) technology was shown to be immune to effects of heavy ion irradiation. The memories did not lose any data in the non-volatile mode when exposed to xenon (maximum effective LET of 128 MeV-cm/sup 2//mg and a total fluence of 1.5/spl times/10/sup 7/ ions/cm/sup 2/). The ferroelectric memories also did not exhibit any loss in the ability to rewrite new data into the memory bits, indicating that no significant degradation of the FE dipoles occurred as a result of the heavy ion exposure. The fast read/write times of FE memories also means that single event gate rupture is unlikely to occur in this technology.