A Portable System for Upset and Transient Upset Testing of VLSI Circuits

A portable system for testing VLSI circuits for both transient and permanent data upsets is described. The description includes both a general discussion of the system concept as well as the detailed design of a system capable of testing 64 data lines. A partially populated system using eight data lines has been built and used to verify system performance by testing a CMOS/SOS random access memory exposed to pulsed radiation from a linear accelerator. The test results on the memory are also discussed.