Abstract
This article describes a previously unreported single-event radiation effect in spiral inductors manufactured in a commercial CMOS technology when subjected to ionizing radiation. Inductors play a major role as the component determining the frequency of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LC$ </tex-math></inline-formula> tank oscillators, which is why any radiation effect in these passive components can have a detrimental impact on the performance of clock generation circuits. Different experiments performed to localize and characterize the single-event effect (SEE) response in a radiation-hardened PLL circuit are discussed and presented together with a hypothesis for the underlying physical mechanism.
Highlights
T HE generation of high quality reference clock signals is essential for many applications
In a tested Phase-Locked Loops (PLLs) circuit, the effect was shown to produce frequency errors resulting in phase excursions large enough to significantly impair circuit performance in applications requiring phase stability in the picosecond range, such as timing detectors used in High Energy Physics [28] [29], or communication circuits for space applications, depending on the chosen loop bandwidth
The fact that this effect was found to directly impact the performance of a low-jitter PLL circuit underlines the increasing importance of considering SingleEvent Effect (SEE) in passive circuit components, which have been traditionally assumed to be insensitive to SEE when compared to their active counterparts
Summary
T HE generation of high quality reference clock signals is essential for many applications. Performance requirements become more stringent and the sensitivity of instrumentation used to detect radiation effects improve, this assumption appears to no longer hold: In this article, we describe the single-event radiation response originating in planar two-turn spiral inductor structures used to form the LC tank in high performance oscillators. As another example, the authors of [8] have recently reported SEE responses generated in Metal-Oxide-Metal capacitors in a 65 nm CMOS technology, another passive component crucial for the design of high-performance circuits
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