Investigation of Heavy-Ion Induced Single-Event Transient in 28 nm Bulk Inverter Chain

Abstract

The reliability of integrated circuits under advanced process nodes is facing more severe challenges. Single-event transients (SET) are an important cause of soft errors in space applications. The SET caused by heavy ions in the 28 nm bulk silicon inverter chains was studied. A test chip with good symmetry layout design was fabricated based on the 28 nm process, and the chip was struck by using 5 kinds of heavy ions with different linear energy transfer (LET) values on heavy-ion accelerator. The research results show that in advanced technology, smaller sensitive volume makes SET cross-section measured at 28 nm smaller than 65 nm by an order of magnitude, the lower critical charge required to generate SET will increase the reliability threat of low-energy ions to the circuit, and high-energy ions are more likely to cause single-event multiple transient (SEMT), which cannot be ignored in practical circuits. The transients pulse width data can be used as a reference for SET modeling in complex circuits.

Characterization of charge sharing induced by high LET heavy ions using inverter chains in a commercial bulk FinFET process

“…In the FinFET technology, the proportion of SEMT cross-sections and SET cross-sections was less than 1% with heavy ion striking of high LET. The SEMT generation probability was compared with that reported in our previous works [8,17], which is shown in figure 11, the SEMT generation probability was more than 30% when the LET of heavy ions was larger than 37.4 MeV cm 2 mg −1 in 65 nm technology, and the SEMT generation probability was more than 10% when the LET of heavy ions was larger than 81.35 MeV cm 2 mg −1 in 28 nm technology. Therefore, we can infer that charge sharing in 14/16 nm FinFET technology may be weakened compared with that in advanced planar nanometer technologies.…”