scope:

The purpose of this technical specification is to provide a more precise definition of the threat that thermal neutrons pose to avionics as a second mechanism for inducing single event upset (SEU) in microelectronics. There are two main points that will be addressed in this technical specification: a) a detailed evaluation of the existing literature on measurements of the thermal flux inside of airliners and b) an enhanced compilation of the thermal neutron SEU cross section in currently available SRAM devices (more than 20 different devices). The net result of the reviews of these two different sets of data will be two ratios that we consider to be very important for leading to the ultimate objective of how large a threat is the SEU rate from thermal neutrons compared to the SEU threat from the high energy neutrons (E >10 MeV). The threat from the high energy neutrons has been dealt with extensively in the literature and has been addressed by two standards (IEC/TS 62396-1 in avionics and [1]1) in microelectronics on the ground).