Measurement of Single-Event Effects on a Numerous Commercial DRAM

To evaluate the characteristics of commercial memory devices for space use, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a Solid State Recorder (SSR) on the Mission Demonstration test Satellite-1 (MDS-1 or "Tsubasa") into geo-stationary transfer orbit (GTO) in February 2002. Passing through the radiation belt exposed the 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 64 Mbit dynamic random access memories (DRAMs), and total ionizing dose (TID) effects. As a result, we could 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, focusing especially on SEU analysis.