Stefan Damkjar NSREC2020 - 2018 Testing at TRIUMF

Abstract--- Proton beam testing was performed on several microcontrollers using proton energies between 2.4 MeV and 57.6 MeV. A remotely operated robotic testing platform was developed to improve testing throughput by minimizing the need for human intervention in the radiation vault. Sensitivity to SEU, SEL, and SEFI faults was determined. Some of the devices showed high SEU sensitivity when tested with low energy protons between 5 MeV and 10 MeV while others did not. We show that this could be due to some devices having a lower critical charge needed to cause SEUs. Consequences of this low energy peak on error rates in orbit are determined. For one of the devices tested, we show that a thin 0.37 mm layer of aluminum shielding reduces the in orbit SEU rate to 0.085 times the SEU rate with no shielding. Testing was also done while varying the incidence angle of the proton beam which shows that the rate of SEL and SEFI faults increased significantly with shallower incidence angle.