0000000000289806
AUTHOR
Andrea Coronetti
Impact of Terrestrial Neutrons on the Reliability of SiC VD-MOSFET Technologies
Accelerated terrestrial neutron irradiations were performed on different commercial SiC power MOSFETs with planar, trench and double-trench architectures. The results were used to calculate the failure cross-sections and the failure in time (FIT) rates at sea level. Enhanced gate and drain leakage were observed in some devices which did not exhibit a destructive failure during the exposure. In particular, a different mechanism was observed for planar and trench gate MOSFETs, the first showing a partial gate rupture with a leakage path mostly between drain and gate, similar to what was previously observed with heavy-ions, while the second exhibiting a complete gate rupture. The observed fail…
The pion single-event latch-up cross-section enhancement : mechanisms and consequences for accelerator hardness assurance
Pions make up a large part of the hadronic environment typical of accelerator mixed-fields. Characterizing device cross-sections against pions is usually disregarded in favour of tests with protons, whose single-event latch-up cross-section is, nonetheless, experimentally found to be lower than that of pions for all energies below 250 MeV. While Monte-Carlo simulations are capable of reproducing such behavior, the reason of the observed pion cross-section enhancement can only be explained by a deeper analysis of the underlying mechanisms dominating proton-silicon and pion-silicon reactions. The mechanisms dominating the single-event latchup response are found to vary with the energy under c…
Assessment of Proton Direct Ionization for the Radiation Hardness Assurance of Deep Submicron SRAMs Used in Space Applications
Proton direct ionization from low-energy protons has been shown to have a potentially significant impact on the accuracy of prediction methods used to calculate the upset rates of memory devices in space applications for state-of-the-art deep sub-micron technologies. The general approach nowadays is to consider a safety margin to apply over the upset rate computed from high-energy proton and heavy ion experimental data. The data reported here present a challenge to this approach. Different upset rate prediction methods are used and compared in order to establish the impact of proton direct ionization on the total upset rate. No matter the method employed the findings suggest that proton dir…