Huiyun- There is a wealth of information in the literature on this topic. If you have access to IEEE journals, there are lots of articles specifically in IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. Although there are many contributors, researchers at NRL and NASA (e.g Art Campbell, Dale McMorrow, Marty Carts, etc.) have been experts in laser-induced SEU for some time. Most information out there relates to CMOS devices and circuits. I'm not an expert in this area and don't know if they've identified differences in response in n-FETs and p-FETs, but given that the p-FETs sit in an n-well, I would be willing to bet there are significant differences. I would expect a targeted literature search would turn up something useful. - Erik ================================================================== Erik Daniel, Ph.D. Voice: (507) 538-5461 Mayo Foundation Fax: (507) 284-9171 200 First Street SW E-mail: daniel.erik@xxxxxxxx Rochester, MN 55905 Web: www.mayo.edu/sppdg/ ================================================================== Msg: #1 in digest From: "Huiyun Li" <Huiyun.Li@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: [SI-LIST] SEU caused by laser illumination Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2005 14:38:41 +0100 Hi there, I have a question about SEU (single-event-upset) in CMOS, hope it's relavent to at least one of the SI-list topics. I've been working on security/attacks on microprocessors, and is currently working on the laser illumination attack, which causes ionization in silicon and may change the state of the struck nodes, just as in a SEU caused by heavy ions. We got some experiment results (like reliably setting a register value to 0, etc), which can be explained by the assumption that the radiation attack is more effective at turning on n-type transistors than their p-type counterparts. However I can't find any references in SEU to prove this assumption, except in some destructive effects (e.g. as for single event burnout (SEB), NMOS are more sensitive to SEB than PMOS. bacause the impact ionization rate is larger for electrons than for holes) . I know bulk silicon has some different properties from epitaxial design in aspect of SEU. Dopant concentrations may also affect the ionization rate. Does it mean that there is no solid rule about turning on n-type and p-type with laser illumination? Huiyun Li Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge JJ Thomson Avenue Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK ------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from si-list: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field or to administer your membership from a web page, go to: //www.freelists.org/webpage/si-list For help: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'help' in the Subject field List FAQ wiki page is located at: http://si-list.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Si-List_FAQ List technical documents are available at: http://www.si-list.org List archives are viewable at: //www.freelists.org/archives/si-list or at our remote archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/si-list/messages Old (prior to June 6, 2001) list archives are viewable at: http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu