Investigations on proton irradiation effects on the performance of microcontroller

The instrument and control (I&C) system plays a vital role in ensuring safety, efficiency, and reliability in industrial applications. The I&C systems are built with various semiconductor-based electronic devices, more in general Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices. These devices are typically designed for normal operating conditions and it may perhaps not withstand the extreme environment of high radiation witnessed in radiation-rich environments. In the present work, the 8051 COTS microcontroller is exposed to proton irradiation with 7, 7.5 and 25 MeV energy and the performance was monitored under offline and online conditions. In both offline and online experiments, single-event effects (SEE) are observed in the device, beyond the proton ion fluence of 5 × 10¹³ p/cm² for offline experiments and 4.76 × 10¹¹ p/cm² for online experiments. Furthermore, it is also found that the DUT exhibited 100 times more tolerance to the ion fluence during offline experiments compared to online experiments. This discrepancy is due to the fact that, under power-off conditions, radiation has less immediate effect on electronics as the operation of electronic devices requires active electrical current and voltage levels.