The Effect of Proton Energy on SEU Cross-Section of a 16Mbit TFT PMOS SRAM with DRAM Capacitors

Proton experimental data are analyzed for a 16-Mbit Thin-Film-Transistor (TFT) PMOS Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) with DRAM capacitors. The presence of high-Z materials as tungsten causes an unusual increase of the Single Event Upset (SEU) proton cross-section for the energies above 100MeV. Monte-Carlo simulations reproduce the experimentally measured cross-sections up to 480MeV and predict a further increase up to GeV energies. The implications of this increase are analyzed in the context of the LHC and other radiation environments where a significant fraction of the fluence lies above 100MeV.