Single-event upset in highly scaled commercial silicon-on-insulator PowerPC microprocessors

Single-event upset effects from heavy ions are measured for Motorola and IBM silicon-on-insulator (SOI) microprocessors with different feature sizes and core voltages. The results are compared with results for similar devices with bulk substrates. The cross sections of the SOI processors are lower than their bulk counterparts, but the threshold is about the same, even though the charge collections depth is more than an order of magnitude smaller in the SOI devices. The scaling of the cross section with reduction of feature size and core voltage dependence for SOI microprocessors is discussed.