Reliability of the Renesas 16 Mbit SRAM in the Radiation Environment of the LHC

To operate the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest particle accelerator of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a new module to control the power converters which deliver the current for the beam influencing magnets of the machine is currently in the development. This Function Generator Controller lite (FGClite) unit uses the 16 Mbit «R1LV1616RSA-7SI#B0» Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) from the Renesas Electronics Corporation as a storage memory for operational data. Reliability and availability of this functional chain is becoming more and more important due to the planned increase of energy and the upcoming high luminosity environment of the accelerator, meaning an increase of radiation levels which local control equipment is expected to be exposed to. To achieve the reliability requirements for the whole system an analysis needs to start on the lowest functional level investigating components like the «Renesas SRAM» and, if possible and reasonable, improving them. Using this «bottom-up» approach the following work investigates the dependability of the memory divided into electrical- and radiation reliability to predict its’ performance in the LHC environment. The main part deals with radiation tolerance executing an irradiation test of the SRAM at a proton beam energy of 24 GeV. This test, performed at the Cern High energy AcceleRator Mixed-field facility (CHARM), is already the fourth irradiation campaign of the memory aiming at qualifying it for the high energy environment of the LHC.