Effects of Muon Irradiation on Advanced Flash Memories

We propose to expose for the first time advanced Flash memories to muons. The continuous scaling down of technology (NAND Flash memories are the electronic components in which the feature size is scaled more rapidly) may cause lighter particles to induce upsets in floating gate cells. This was the case with SRAM in the recent past, which, at very small feature size, has become sensitive to muons. No experimental data are available in the literature for Flash memories in this respect. Memories with both NAND (down to a feature size of 16 nm) and NOR (down to 45 nm) architecture will be exposed to muon beam. Thanks to the collaboration with the manufacturer, we will have access to test modes routines that are not available to the user.