Correlation of Heavy-Ion and Laser Testing on a DC/DC PWM Controller

Abstract

Pulsed laser and heavy-ion experiments were carried out on a commercial-off-the-shelf DC/DC pulse width modulation controller to study the equivalent laser Linear Energy Transfer (LET) at wavelengths of 750 nm, 800 nm, 850 nm and 920 nm. The laser experiments showed that the shorter wavelength laser has smaller threshold energy to generate single-event transient pulses. The cross-sections versus heavy-ion LET and laser energy per pulse were obtained and correlated. The heavy-ion and laser cross-sections fit well considering the effects of metal layers on the chip. The results of this research facilitate the future pulsed laser testing by providing explicit coefficients to evaluate the equivalent laser LET, which can be used to replace costly heavy-ion testing.

Laser-assisted SER estimation in advanced CMOS technologies

“…Laser injection from the interconnect side and from the Si backside have been widely reported in the literature [8,9]. In this work backside laser exposure is used because the interconnect layers present in Intel's 22nm/32nm technology nodes [10] are very dense.…”