Laser as a Tool to Study Radiation Effects in CMOS

Abstract

Energetic particles from cosmic ray or terrestrial sources can strike sensitive areas of CMOS devices and cause soft errors. Understanding the effects of such interactions is crucial as the device technology advances, and chip reliability has become more important than ever. Particle accelerator testing has been the standard method to characterize the sensitivity of chips to single event upsets (SEUs). However, because of their costs and availability limitations, other techniques have been explored. Pulsed laser has been a successful tool for characterization of SEU behavior, but to this day, laser has not been recognized as a comparable method to beam testing. In this thesis, I propose a methodology of correlating laser soft error rate (SER) to particle beam gathered data. Additionally, results are presented showing a temperature dependence of SER and the "neighbor effect" phenomenon where due to the close proximity of devices a "weakening effect" in the ON state can be observed.ii Acknowledgments