The effect of sea level cosmic rays on electronic devices

Calculations are made of the rates at which bursts of electronic charge are created in silicon by cosmic rays at sea level. These rates are reduced to two types: point charge bursts and distributed ionization wake bursts. A procedure is shown to evaluate the soft fail rates of simple devices caused by cosmic rays. It is shown that an 8-M byte semiconductor memory made of 10×10 μm diodes will have a soft fail rate of about one per day.