Radiation response of SiGe low noise amplifier irradiated with different energy protons

Abstract

This research, for the first time, uses different energy protons of 5 MeV and 10 MeV to irradiate low noise amplifiers (LNAs) with a frequency band ranging from 1.4GHz to 1.8 GHz designed with 0.25 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. It studies the resulting radiation effects and also compares the RF responses of the LNAs under different energy proton irradiations. The irradiation fluences of the two different protons are up to 1 × 1015 protons/cm2. The response characteristics of input reflection coefficient S11, transmission gain S21 and noise figure (NF) of the device RF performance before and after the 5 MeV and 10 MeV proton irradiations are compared and discussed. The results show that the input reflection coefficient decreases after the proton irradiations, and at 5 MeV, the transmission gain decreases by 1.8 dB at most, and the NF increases by 1.5 dB at most. Moreover, the degradation of LNA characteristic parameters under 5 MeV proton irradiation is much more than under 10 MeV proton irradiation, with the irradiation dose of 1 × 1015 protons/cm2.