A booster linac based on the Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ linac) has been put into routine operation on the 6.5 MV EN tandem accelerator at the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) Ion Beam Materials Research Lab (IBMRL) for Radiation Effects Microscopy (REM) experiments with high energy, heavy ion beams. The booster linac consists of two RFQ stages that accelerate heavy ions with m/q < 8 from 0.25 MeV/amu up to 1.22 MeV/amu in the first stage and to 1.90 MeV/amu in the second stage to produce high Linear Energy Transfer (LET) ions for REM. This RFQ linac has a total length of 6.0 meters and is installed on a new experimental beam line at the SNL IBMRL to measure single‐event upset (SEU) cross‐sections of integrated circuits (ICs) and to perform radiation hardness research using REM with the associated Ion Electron Emission Microscope (IEEM). This paper presents the recent beam measurement results from operation of the RFQ linac with beams from silicon to gold and compares these results with theoretical beam dynamics calculations. It also describes the details of the experiments to measure SEU cross‐sections and IEEM. © 2003 American Institute of Physics