Testing a Commercial MRAM Under Neutron and Alpha Radiation in Dynamic Mode

Abstract

Academic and industrial research interest in terrestrial radiation effects of electronic devices has expanded over the last years from avionics and military applications to commercial applications as well. At the same time, the need for faster and more reliable memories has given growth to new memory technologies such as Magnetic (magneto-resistive) Random Access Memories (MRAM), a promising new non-volatile memory technology that will probably replace in the future the current SRAM and FLASH based memories. In this paper, we evaluate the soft error resilience of a commercial toggle MRAM in static and dynamic test mode, under neutron radiation with energies of 25, 50 and 80 MeV as well as under a Californium (Cf-252) alpha source.