An Evaluation of Flash Cells Used in Critical Applications

Abstract: Due to the common use of Flash technology in many commercial and industrial Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs) such as FPGAs and mixed-signal microcontrollers, flash technology is being utilized in fuzed munition applications. This presents a long-term reliability issue for both DoD and NASA safety- and mission-critical applications. A thorough understanding of the data retention failure modes and statistics associated with Flash data retention is of vital concern to the fuze safety community….