Ionizing radiation effects in electronic devices with an emphasis on non-volatile memories

Abstract

The first part of the tutorial will give an overview on the most relevant issues concerning ionizing radiation effects in advanced components. The evolution of CMOS technology following Moore's law is making electronic devices increasingly sensitive to external disturbances, among which ionizing radiation. Particles with lower and lower ionizing power are able to corrupt a digital bit of information in state-of-the-art devices. Until some years ago, ionizing radiation was an issue only in very harsh environments, such as space or high-energy physics experiments, but today soft errors are a concern even at sea level, especially for high-reliability applications, due to atmospheric neutrons and alpha-emitting contaminants. When an ionizing particle strikes an electronic component, a plethora of different effects may occur, depending on the type of device and impinging radiation. These effects may be transient, permanent or even destructive. Single event effects, stochastic events that occur when a single particle hits the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as total ionizing dose effects, causing a progressive degradation of the device parameters due to the build-up of charge trapping in oxides and/or interface state generation, will be presented.