Combined ionizing radiation & electromagnetic interference test procedure to achieve reliable integrated circuits

Abstract

International standards have been proposed and used to test Integrated Circuits (ICs) for Total-Ionizing Dose (TID) and Single-Event Upset (SEU) as well as for Electromagnetic Interference (EMI). Nevertheless, these standards are separately applied to the IC or electronic system, one after the other, and do not take into account the combined effects of these types of radiation may take over the ICs. In more detail, there is no standard that rules combined tests for TID, SEU and EMI. This paper aims to fulfill this lack of product quality information and proposes a new methodology to improve the reliability of ICs by performing combined tests for TID, SEU and EMI. We also present recent experimental results from combined measurements that we performed on a commercial FPGA IC widely used in critical embedded applications such as aerospace and automotive. Such results strongly suggest that the effects of radiation are not negligible and should be taken into account if one intends to design reliable embedded systems.