Effects of Ultra-High Total Ionizing Dose in Nanoscale Bulk CMOS Technologies

Particle accelerators are an excellent instrument to investigate at the smallest scale in our universe. The last breakthrough was made by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with the observation of the Higgs boson (2012) at CERN. A future upgrade of the particle accelerator, called High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), is planned to increase its potential for new discoveries in particle physics. The upgrade will produce a ten-fold increase in luminosity resulting in a significant increase in the number of collisions in the various detectors distributed along the particle accelerator. The higher number of colli- sions will increase the amount of interesting events for particle physicists. However, the important increase of particle collisions will result in an unprecedented level of radiation in the detectors. This high radiation level is a concern for the electronics in the detectors as radiation damages the transistors. The integrated energy deposited by ionizing radiation, called total ionizing dose (TID), exceeds by several orders of magnitude the typical requirements for the main concerned industry, space (hundreds of Mrad(SiO2) vs. hundreds of krad(SiO2)). CERN developed the tools and knowledge to design radiation hardened application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) by characterizing the radiation response of selected commercial technologies and using hardening-by-design (HBD) techniques. The characterization to total ionizing dose (TID) of the 65 nm CMOS technology used in the development of ASICs for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) was realized. The characterization was performed within the temperature range of interest (−30 ◦C, 0 ◦C and 25 ◦C) up to 500 Mrad(SiO2). The different degradation mechanisms have been outlined. The data are used to create models that will allow integrated circuit (IC) designers to directly simulate the impact of total ionizing dose (TID) during the design of the ASICs. Four publications IEEE conference have been published based on the measurement performed during this work. In addition to these measurements, the radiation response of different foundries have been study in 65nm. We showed that the effects known as Radiation-Induced Narrow Channel Effects (RINCEs) and Radiation-Induced Short Channel Effects (RISCEs) are also observed in at least three different foundries, which increases our confidence in the universality of the mechanisms. The study of total ionizing dose effects in two smaller technological nodes began, namely 40 nm and 28 nm CMOS technologies, from different foundries in order to investigate the next viable technology.