Development of extendable on-line test system for total ionizing dose effect of microprocessor

Abstract

BackgroundCompared with transistors and small-scale integrated circuits, the total ionizing dose (TID) effect and testing of multifunctional large scale integrated microprocessors are more complex. The difficulty of testing is to analyze the failure mode of microprocessor online from limited information under irradiation.PurposeThis study aims to develop an extendable on-line test system for TID effect of microprocessor and carry out preliminary application.MethodsThe testing system was composed of control circuit, extendable signal acquisition circuit, tested sample interface, upper computer and software. Multiple parametric measurement or functional verification methods such as power consumption current, on-chip memory, communication, clock, analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converter (ADC/DAC) and direct memory access of microprocessor were provided. Sixteen microprocessors with feature size 40 nm were irradiated with 60Co source and tested on-line.ResultsAfter the irradiation dose is accumulated to (377.44±20.34) Gy(Si), all samples are malfunctional with digital communication interruption, sudden drop in current consumption, abnormal ADC/DAC output and so on.ConclusionBased on all 12 kinds of parametric measurement or functional verification results, the TID effect of this type of microprocessor is probable to be a functional failure caused by some kernel instructions. The on-line test system of this study can provide more direct data information for the total dose failure mode analysis.

Keywords

• total ionizing dose effect
• on-line testing
• microprocessor
• parametric degradation
• functional failure