Computer-forgetfulness, cosmic radiation, and an ion-microscope

After an introduction to the cosmic ray environment, we show why few-MeV heavy ions are suitable to simulate cosmic radiation effects in integrated circuits, and how the sensitive sites for various radiation effects can be localised using an ion microscope and a specially designed, small hardware circuit. As a tutorial for the potential of the microprobe technique we show a series of results obtained for a 2k × 8 bit static RAM (HM65162).