Introduction

Radiation environments can cause damage effects on electronic devices, leading to internal signal changes, thus causing functional failure or even damage of electronic components. Generally, the problems are solved by the special radiation-hardened process. Although designing chips using such process is not very complex, the fabrication is very expensive. Moreover, the update of the rad-hard process is slow so that the development of high-performance chips is limited. In order to solve these problems, commercial CMOS process is widely adopted to speed up the design cycle and to reduce the design cost. Although the commercial CMOS process does not deal with the radiation effects, the radiation effects of CMOS integrated circuits (ICs) can be mitigated by radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) techniques. In the beginning of the last two decades, the IC designers show special focuses on the rad-hard digital ICs to mitigate single-event effects in processors, SRAMs and registers. Recently, RHBD techniques have been applied to analog and RF circuits to implement high-performance operational amplifiers, data converters, phase-locked loops, and receiver/transceiver et al.

This course will describe three parts of contents. Firstly, radiation effects of submicron CMOS devices are firstly given. The mechanism and the phenomenon of total-ionization dose (TID) effects, single-event (SE) effects and displacement damage (DD) effects will be presented. Next, a survey of RHBD techniques of CMOS mixed-signal circuits will be introduced. In this part, the mostly used RHBD methods including special geometry layout, space and time redundancy circuits and the simulation of radiation effects will be concluded. At last, the radiation hardness assurance testing techniques will be described.

Content

Module 1 - Radiation Environment and Radiation Interaction Physics Process

Module 2 - Total Ionization Dose Effects

Module 3 - Displacement Damage Effects

Module 4 - Single Event Effects

Module 5 - Single Event Latch-Up Hardened Strategies

Module 6 - Accurate SPICE Models for CMOS Hardened Devices

Module 7 - Radiation-Hardened-by-Design for Digital Circuits

Module 8 - Radiation-Hardened-by-Design for Analog/Mixed-signal Circuits

Module 9 - Radiation Effect Simulation

Module 10 - Pulsed Laser Technique for SEE Testing

Module 11 - Radiation Hardness Assurance Testing

Reference textbook

Courses for students

PhD students (40 hours)

Master students (40 hours)