Radiation Induced Effects in Commercial Memories onboard Alsat-1
In this part, a review of radiation induced error on memory devices of an Algerian satellite, which named as Alsat-1, has been made. Alsat-1 was launched in November 2002 into a 686 km sun-synchronous orbit. This microsatellite had designed Earth imaging cameras which had capability to provide 32-meter resolution imaging in 3 spectral bands (green, red, and near infrared) with an extremely wide imaging swath of 600 km on the ground with a revisit of the same area at least every 4 days with just a single satellite. Since Alsat-1 is placed in a LEO of 686 km, elevated levels of radiation caused by the lack of atmosphere increase the probability of SEUs. A SEU is a non-destructive error which usually affects logic cells in such a way that it can cause a bit in a memory device to change logic states. This phenomenon is caused by a false charge created by the transit of a single ionizing particle through a memory chip. In this paper, the observations includes th...
