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 "Tsubasa") 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 64 Mbit 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.