Comprehensive Study of Total Ionizing Dose Damage Mechanisms and Their Effects on Noise Sources in a 90 nm CMOS Technology

Abstract

Irradiation tests on 90 nm CMOS devices at different total ionizing doses lead to new insights into degradation mechanisms in gate oxides and lateral isolation structures and into their impact on gate and drain current noise sources. The action of lateral parasitic transistors and their physical parameters are studied in different operating conditions. The main focus is on 1/f noise, which is one of the few parameters which are sizably affected by irradiation. Irradiation effects on the noise in the gate current are discussed in this paper for the first time. The analysis of the behavior of thick oxide I/O transistors provides a comparison both with thin oxide core devices and with previous, less scaled CMOS generations.