Institute of Solid State Physics

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Radiation-tolerant integrated circuits
Nikolaus Czepl
Festkörperphysik
11:15 - 12:15 Wednesday 12 May 2021 

Under harsh conditions the performance of microelectronics usually degrades over time. This is also the case in environments with ionizing radiation. Nowadays, there are several known mechanisms how ionizing radiation impacts the behavior of silicon based MOSFETs. These mechanisms have to be considered especially when engineering integrated circuits for space, medical or military applications. Another application which is influenced by ionizing radiation, is the newly developed detector of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at the CERN nuclear research center. The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider project aims to crank up the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries in the future, which results in higher radiation exposure to the detectors and their readout circuits. The particle detector of the HL-LHC will be designed in a 28nm CMOS process node and should be constructed to withstand a total ionizing dose of up to 1Grad. Therefore, profound understanding of the influences of ionizing radiation to the used 28nm process is of utmost importance.
In general, this talk is split into two parts. The first part provides a brief general overview on the effects of ionizing radiation to silicon based integrated circuits. The effects discussed in this talk can be summed up under the designation total ionizing dose (TID) effects, where high energetic particles lead to a slow degradation of transistor performance.
With increasing integration density in the discussed advanced process nodes, further techniques such as silicon on insulator (SOI) or strain engineering are necessary to achieve the desired performance of silicon-based MOS devices. These extended techniques lead to the fact that the behavior under ionizing radiation leads to new effects, which couldn’t be observed in older process nodes. To determine the behavior of these advanced process nodes in detail, TCAD simulations are used to simulate the behavior of the MOSFET devices, which will be covered in part two of the talk.