520 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 62, NO. 2, APRIL 2015 Stuck Bits Study in DDR3 SDRAMs Using 45-MeV Proton Beam Chulseung Lim, Hyun Soo Jeong, Geunyong Bak, Sanghyeon Baeg, Member, IEEE, Shi-Jie Wen, and Richard Wong Abstract—This work shares the observations of stuck bits by proton beam in DDR3 components in 3x-nm technologies. The DDR3 SDRAMs from four major DRAM manufacturers were tested with a 45-MeV proton beam at an operating frequency of 800 MHz. The beam exposure resulted in single bit upset (SBU) and multiple bit upsets (MBUs), as well as single and multiple stuck bits in a word due to micro-dose and displacement damage effects. The number of stuck bits reduced as the refresh interval duration was decreased. Moreover, for the tested samples, the stuck bits were recovered completely and could be run in the normal operation mode after annealing at . The occurrence of multiple stuck bits in a word was likely due to damages to the control logic and those stuck bits were recovered as well after annealing at . Index Terms—DDR3, displacement damage effect, DRAM cell retention time, DRAMs, proton beams, SDRAM, stuck bits, TID effect. I. INTRODUCTION W ITH technology scaling, the soft error rate (SER) due to high energy particles is generally expected to increase, not only in memory cores but also in logic functional blocks in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) components. This is because in a memory component, the critical charge typically decreases with shrinking bit size. However, as the technology has scaled, the capacitance in a DRAM bit cell has stayed relatively constant, the area shrinkage of a memory bit has helped to maintain the SER of a memory component constant over multiple generations of technology [1]. Additionally, the stuck bits—due mainly to the leakage current—because of microdose and displacement damages on a bit cell also appear in synchronous dynamic random access memories (SDRAMs). The radiation sensitivity of SDRAMs has been reported in [2]–[9]. Furthermore, reports of micro-dose and displacement damages Manuscript received March 25, 2014; revised September 18, 2014; accepted January 06, 2015. Date of publication March 02, 2015; date of current version April 10, 2015. This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean government Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2012R1A2A2A01015719), the Brain Scouting Program funded by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (HB615-12-2001), and the “GRRC” Project of Gyeonggi Provincial Government. C. Lim, H. S. Jeong, G. Bak, and S. Baeg are with the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Hanyang University, Sa 3-dong Sangrok-Gu Ansan, Kyeong-gi-Do 426-791, Korea (e-mail: lcs85@hanyang.ac.kr; bau@hanyang.ac.kr). S.-J. Wen and R. Wong are with the Component Engineering Group, Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, CA 95134 USA. Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNS.2015.2392851 caused by single particles appearing in SDRAMs have been published [10]–[14]. In contrast to bit cells, the control logic elements inside DRAMs are expected to scale with shrinking technologies and become more vulnerable to high-energy particles due to two main reasons: reduced critical charge in control logic primitives and increased area owing to additions of increasingly complex features in recent DRAMs. SDRAM has many logic blocks: control logic, mode registers, decoders, and bank control logic [3]. Any upset in the logic units can lead to the simultaneous flipping of numerous bits, which can be catastrophic to a system with DRAMs. Charged particles can cause single event effects (SEE) as well as stuck bits. For instance, the accumulated particle damage in a MOSFET can alter transistor characteristics such as threshold voltage shift [15], [16]. In the reversed-biased depletion region, carrier generation due to displacement damage can increase the leakage current characteristics of affected bits, and this increase in the leakage current can contribute to destruction of the data stored in the corresponding bit cells [20]. The above mentioned damages can be recovered by high temperature annealing [16], [17]. In this work, SEE tests were performed using a 45-MeV proton beam on DDR3 samples prepared with 3x-nm technologies by four different manufacturers, where x value represents various values. This present study focused mainly on analyzing stuck bits. As a result, the progressive removals of stuck bits was demonstrated successfully by passing damaged DRAMs through multiple annealing tests conducted with four different temperatures higher than . II. TEST FACILITY AND PREPARATION The beam experiments were performed with protons from the MC-50 cyclotron at the Korea Institute of Radiological & Medical Science (KIRAMS) in South Korea [19]. The facility provides a 45-MeV proton beam, as well as beams with energies lower than 45 MeV. Changing beam energies on the fly is not supported conveniently. In our experiments, only a 45-MeV beam was used. A total of eight DDR3 samples from four different manufacturers–(two samples per manufacturer)–were used in the beam test. One sample from each manufacturer was exposed to the beam while it was operating, while the other sample was beamed without supplying power to it. The main object of this work was to observe variations across the manufacturers instead of variations in the same type of samples. The samples were 4 Gb DDR3 components with a maximum operating frequency of 800 MHz. 0018-9499 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. LIM et al.: STUCK BITS STUDY IN DDR3 SDRAMs USING 45-MeV PROTON BEAM 521 Fig. 1. MC-50 cyclotron proton beam line and setup of memory tester system. All samples had 8 banks, 13-bit pages, and 10-bit column addresses with 3-bit burst addresses, and VDD and VDDQ operating voltage of 1.5 V. These samples are referred to using XY format throughout this paper, where X denotes manufacturer name, and Y denote sample number. The manufacturer names and the technologies used in the samples could not be disclosed owing to the agreements between the manufacturers and Cisco for the use of the sample Cisco products. To use DDR3 memories, we built in-house memory testers with hardware and software tools. These testers can communicate with a daughter card loaded with memory samples, as shown in Fig. 1. The memory testers recorded the individual failing addresses and read-data during the experiments. The device under test (DUT) and the mother board were connected by a SO-DIMM interface and followed the JEDEC standard [20]. Three different test patterns were employed under room temperature: all zero (ALL0), all one (ALL1), and checker board (CB). The beam room in the radiation facility is located underground and is air-conditioned to maintain a room temperature of around . The typical operating temperature for commercial SDRAMs, is 0 to as measured at the center or top side of the chip. The following JEDEC standard values for temperature and refresh cycle parameters were used in the tests: s refresh cycle for 0 to and s refresh cycle for the temperatures over [21]. III. EXPERIMENT RESULTS Multiple proton tests runs were performed with various predetermined beam times over several days. During the proton exposures, single-bit upset (SBU) and multiple-bit upset (MBU) were observed, and many of them appeared repeatedly at the same addresses. After the removal of beam exposure, the recurring upsets occurred, and they were classified as stuck bits. Fig. 2 shows the statistics of observed stuck bits after beam irradiation when the samples were accessed actively. The horizontal axis shows the four different samples A1, B1, C1, and D1. The vertical axis shows the scaled ratios of stuck bits in Fig. 2. Observed stuck bits under different test patterns for four different samples after irradiations; (a) shows percentage of stuck bits in each pattern, (b) shows cross sections. each test pattern, as shown in Fig. 2(a). The three vertical bars in each column of Fig. 2(a), correspond to three different patterns: ALL0, ALL1, and CB. Notably, not all samples were exposed to the same amount of beam radiation; sample B1 was exposed to about 1.3x the flux that other samples were exposed to, and accordingly, it had a greater absolute number of stuck bits than the other samples. The observed stuck bits are attributed to the accessed logical address: if a logical address returns a different bit pattern than that expected, it is considered a stuck bit. The stuck bit can be classified as a multiple stuck bits (MSBs) in cases where multiple bits do not match or as a single stuck bit (SSB) in cases where one bit is mismatched. Please note that not all stuck bits appeared in all patterns. Some stuck bits were masked by the test pattern and some stuck bits were intermittent. Although the upsets were observed under the ALL0 pattern during irradiation, stuck bits with the same pattern after beam exposure were not observed in samples C1 and D1. To ensure that the results were not influenced by the test setup, the same tests were repeated several times. Retention tests were performed to check whether the results in Fig. 2 are from design specific to manufactures. The ALL0 pattern retention tests also did not indicate the presence of stuck bits in sample C1 and D1. Detailed retention test results are given in Section IV. Fig. 2(b) shows the cross section for different test patterns with the error bars. The error bars indicate 95% of the confidence interval of a Poisson mean. Generally, no significant differences are observed across different patterns, except for the 522 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 62, NO. 2, APRIL 2015 ALL0 pattern in samples C1 and D1. Sample A1 was most sensitive, while sample C1 had the lowest cross section compared with the other samples. Fig. 3 shows the failed bit distribution of all stuck bits after proton irradiation. This figures show the entire array space of DUTs. The bit map is based on a logical structure because the physical structure is unavailable. There are 8 K bits in each row address, which are further accessed by 10-bit column addresses including 3-bit burst addresses; each address returns 8-bit data and one burst address returns 64-bit data. The horizontal axis shows the addresses composed of both 3-bit banks and 16-bit row addresses. The 8 bank blocks are placed equidistantly in the horizontal direction. The two different types of stuck bits–SSBs and MSBs–are shown in the figure. The stuck bits appear to be distributed randomly over the entire array regardless of the test patterns. Please note that the symbols overlap at times because of that large symbols are used for clarity, therefore overlapping symbols appear darker in Fig. 3. All overlapping addresses in Fig. 3 are burst addresses. All or most of the 64 bits from each burst address were shown to be flipped and were classified as MSBs. Further discussions of such MSBs are made in terms of control logic damage in the next section. Most stuck bits were MSBs for the CB pattern in Fig. 3(c). Some SSBs with the ALL1 or ALL0 pattern appeared as MSBs when the test pattern was changed to CB because of the pattern dependent masks in ALL1 and ALL0. IV. DISCUSSIONS OF STUCK BITS The stuck bits shown in Figs. 2 and 3 were observed many days after the irradiation. The stuck bits due to micro-dose and displacement damage effects were primarily ascribed to high leakage in a cell [18], [22]. For further insight into stuck failures, two types of experiments–refresh dependencies, and annealing by high temperature–were performed to ensure that the presence of the stuck bits could primarily be ascribed to micro-dose and displacement damage effects instead of other failure mechanisms [18]. In the rest of this section, stuck bits are discussed from various aspects. A. Refresh Time Dependency Test Fig. 4 shows that the number of stuck bits is reduced as the refresh interval is shortened. This is the typical observation for bit cells with dose- and displacement damage effects. The s and s refresh cycle duration were selected based on the JEDEC standards and the samples’ specifications. As expected, the number of stuck bits decreased when the refresh time was reduced to s from s, and this observation was applicable to all samples. The SSB ratio was the highest in sample B1. For the s refresh interval, relatively fewer stuck bits of both types still remained. Many MSBs failed at many bit locations, as shown in Fig. 3. Those MSBs could not be corrected by single error correctiondouble error detection (SEC-DEC) which method commonly uses the Hamming code [23]. Fig. 3. Bit maps of stuck bits after irradiation for four samples; (a) is for ALL0, (b) is for ALL1, and (c) is for CB. Fig. 4. Number of stuck bits is reduced when refresh time is reduced from s to s. B. Multiple Stuck Bits Table I summarizes the MSB read-data before the annealing process. Please note that the address and the read data are pre- sented in the hexadecimal format. The data shows that the most data bits were flipped regardless of the background patterns. As LIM et al.: STUCK BITS STUDY IN DDR3 SDRAMs USING 45-MeV PROTON BEAM TABLE I MULTIPLE STUCK BITS CASES 523 components were baked for 12 hours at four different temperatures in a sequence: , , , and . After annealing at each temperature, the samples were tested at room temperature using the three patterns: ALL0, ALL1, and CB. The test results of the samples are shown in Fig. 5. The horizontal axis represents the annealing temperatures. The number of SSBs decreased consistently as the annealing temperature increased. However, at a certain annealing temperature, the cross section of the SSBs increased. This increase in stuck bits seemed to be caused by random re-sticking of the displacement damages during annealing [13], [18]. The MSBs increased randomly as well, which could be due to similar reasons as the SSBs, but in the control logic elements. After annealing at , all stuck bits were removed. D. Experiments with no Power to Samples can be inferred from the table, some of the read data seemed to be SSBs depending on the background pattern. For example, in sample A1, an SSB was observed at 0A3E9BB under ALL0; however, MSBs were also observed under the ALL1 pattern at the same address. It seems that a SSB at a bit cell and the damage to control logic coexist. Displacement damage is known to affect local segments, typically single bits. Moreover, gate oxide trapping owing to the dose effect leads to the formation of local stuck bits because of the increased leakage current. However, the MSBs listed in Table I cannot be explained by stuck bits on local memory cells. Additionally, the physical damage mechanisms reported in [22] could not explain the presence of those MSBs. Since the MSBs in Table I appeared consistently and intermittently during the annealing process, we believe that the MSBs are related to damages in the control logic. Unfortunately, it is difficult to explain which portion of the damaged control logic can possibly flip most of the 64-bit data, as summarized in Table I. However, if we could borrow the experiences from typical design practice, the default values—during the burst operation—can be read if the I/O multiplexer logic is not switched properly in time. Because the tests were performed at the full speed of 800 MHz, the timing may have been affected when the control logic became leaky because of damage due to proton beam irradiation. The default value can be all 0 or all 1 depending on the specific implementation; here, it was 0 for manufacturers A and B and 1 for manufacturers C and D. C. High-temperature Annealing Test High-temperature annealing tests were performed to see if they would result in progressive removal of the stuck bits. The Fig. 6 shows the experimental cross sections of stuck bits in the samples (A2, B2, C2, and D2) that were irradiated without being supplied operational power. The partial flux (about 3%) exposed in sample A2 was ascribed to the radiation during active sample operations. Fig. 7 shows the ratios of the cross sections of stuck bits from powered and unpowered irradiations. In the case sample C2, there were no stuck bits under unpowered irradiation. The cross section of samples A1 and D1 was about 2.5 time higher than those of samples A2 and D2. A. M. Chugg et al. previously reported that the stuck bits due to displacement damages occurred equally in both the powered and unpowered states [13]; in context, the stuck bits in Fig. 7 are present not exclusively because of the displacement damage effect in the products of manufacturers A and D. Detailed examinations of failing mechanisms with respect to power dependency will be reported further studies. E. Progressive Occurrences of Stuck Bit with Increasing Annealing Temperatures In Fig. 8, the stuck bits from all high-temperature annealing tests are re-classified by their recurrence. Five tests were conducted in total. However, the maximum number of stuck bit recurrence events was three. Many stuck bits disappeared progressively after annealing at low temperatures. Moreover, it was observed that some stuck bits changed their type from MSB to SSB, as test temperatures were elevated; however, the reverse case–from SSB and MSB–was observed once. In certain cases, the stuck bits that were not detected at a lower temperature showed up after higher temperature annealing. For example, all stuck bits from the sample C1 appeared once; however, the stuck bits in sample D1 had appear up to three times before disappearing completely after annealing at . F. Retention Time Experiments with Post Annealed Samples Fig. 9 shows the number of failing words with the ALL0 pattern by using previously annealed samples of A1, C1, and D1. Sample B1 was excluded from this experiment because the sample was irradiated again with the proton beam after the first annealing process. The numbers of failing words in samples C1 and D1 were zero. It should be noted that the result in Fig. 2(a) shows that no stuck bit was observed with the ALL0 patterns for 524 Fig. 5. Cross-section depending on high-temperature annealing tests of sams refresh ples irradiated with power supplied to samples: (a) is for SSB with s refresh cycle, (c) is for SSB with s recycle, (b) is for MSB with s refresh cycle. fresh cycle, and (d) is for MSB with samples C1 and D1. Somehow, the nature of cell design with 0 state from two manufactures C and D is not affected by the leakage current failure mechanism in both the retention time test and the stuck bit. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NUCLEAR SCIENCE, VOL. 62, NO. 2, APRIL 2015 Fig. 6. Cross section depending on high-temperature annealing tests of samples s irradiated when power was not supplied to samples: (a) is for SSB with s refresh cycle, (c) is the SSB with refresh cycle, (b) is for MSB with s refresh cycle, and (d) is for MSB with s refresh cycle. Since the number of stuck bits could be characterized further based on the temperature as well as retention time, a bleed-down LIM et al.: STUCK BITS STUDY IN DDR3 SDRAMs USING 45-MeV PROTON BEAM 525 Fig. 7. Cross section ratios of stuck bits in powered samples versus unpowered samples for four different manufactures. The ratio is cross section of sample X1 divided by the same of sample X2 where X represents a manufacturer. Fig. 8. Stuck bits are re-classified based on ratio of their appearance across five s. annealing tests with refresh time of Fig. 10. Number of failing words for various retention time under ALL1 pat(room temperature), (b) , and (c) . tern; at (a) Fig. 9. Number of failing words with various retention times usingALL0 pattern under room temperature for annealed samples of A1, C1 and D1. test was performed for three different temperatures with annealed samples A1, C1, and D1 and the results are shown in Fig. 10. The number of failing words increased rapidly with increasing temperature. Samples C1 and D1 showed similar tendencies in terms of the number of failing words for the three temperatures in Fig. 10. For sample A1, there was a sharp increase in the number of failing words at . It is important to note that bit failures were not observed within the retention time of 64 ms. However, it was evident that the irradiated samples showed worse retention time even after annealing at up to in comparison with generally observed SDRAMs retention time, which is about 4 seconds [24], [25]. The results in Fig. 10 indirectly imply that the stuck bits in this work can be ascribed to the leaky failing mechanism rather than stuck-at type failure. V. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, an experimental study was performed for stuck bits in DDR3 components from four different manufacturers by using the MC-50 proton beam. Intermittently repeated SSBs or MSBs were detected during and after the beam test. 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