Is FRAM affected by radiation or soft errors?
Volatile memories, DRAM and SRAM, use a capacitor to store charge or a simple latch to store state. These cells can be easily upset by a alpha particles, cosmic rays, heavy ions, gamma, x-rays, etc. which cause bits to flip to an opposite state. This is called a soft error, since a subsequent write will be retained. The rate at which this occurs is called the Soft Error Rate (SER) of the device. Because the FRAM cell stores the state as a PZT film polarization, an alpha hit is very unlikely to cause the polarization to change a given cell’s state and the FRAM terrestrial SER is not even measurable.
