In-flight measurement of space radiation effects on commercial DRAM

To evaluate the characteristics of commercial memory devices, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a Solid State Recorder (SSR) on the Mission Demonstration test Satellite-1 (MDS-1 or "Tsubaso") into geo-stationary transfer orbit (GTO) in February 2002. Passing through the Van Allen Belt exposed MDS-1 to severe radioactive rays in every orbit. This flight experiment measured the rate of Single-Event-Upsets (SEUs) on a large number of stacked 64Mbit Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), and the distribution of Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects. As a result, we can calculate the actual SEU rate, and we confirmed the capabilities of two types of on-the-fly Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) mechanisms. This paper presents the results of the space experiment of SSR, especially focusing on SEU analysis.