Offering a semiconductor process technology course and laboratory is certainly not the norm in a standard electronics engineering technology curriculum. However, engineering technology students should know something about semiconductor process technology since these are the future graduates that will provide the maintenance and equipment testing on the equipment used in process operations in a wafer fab manufacturing plant.

In this paper, we have explored the feasibility of a carbon nanotube (CNT) ring oscillator (RO) for detecting ionized radiation. The effect of ion irradiation on the oscillation frequency of CNT-based RO is considered using the displacement damage dose (DDD) methodology. The analytical model of the irradiated resistance of metallic single-walled CNT (SWCNT) has been developed and verified by experimental data for increasing DDD from 10 12 to 10 17 MeV/g. We have found that 100 times increase in the DDD from 10 15 to 10 17 MeV/g results in nearly 20 times increase in propagation delay of an input signal passing through 500 nm metallic SWCNT, which can be easily read. It is also found that an order of magnitude increase in the length of SWCNT results in approximately an order of magnitude decrease in the minimum range of detectable DDD considering the oscillation frequency of CNT RO as the output of the proposed radiation detector. As carbon nanotube with the record length of 50 cm has been reported, it is very promising for detecting much lower radiation.