CMOS IC radiation hardening by design

Design techniques for radiation hardening of integrated circuits in commercial CMOS technologies are presented. Circuits designed with the proposed approaches are more tolerant to both total dose and to single event effects. The main drawback of the techniques for radiation hardening by design is the increase of silicon area, compared with a conventional design

CMOS IC RADIATION HARDENING BY DESIGN

Design techniques for radiation hardening of integrated circuits in commercial CMOS technologies are presented. Circuits designed with the proposed approaches are more tolerant to both total dose and to single event effects. The main drawback of the techniques for radiation hardening by design is the increase of silicon area, compared with a conventional design

Exploration of advanced CMOS technologies for new pixel detector concepts in High Energy Physics

This thesis presents the author’s original concepts for the development of radiation hard monolithic pixel sensors that can replace hybrid pixel sensors in high energy physics experiments. It presents one of the first practical implementations of monolithic pixel sensors that potentially offer performance figures similar to those of the hybrid pixel technology with fewer material and for a fraction of the cost. Various pixel sensor prototypes in different technologies have been designed and manufactured for the first time. Prototypes allowed the characterization of the basic components of active pixel sensors and the evaluation of device parameters. Presented devices show strong indications that monolithic sensors can achieve very high radiation tolerance with parameters similar to the existing hybrid technology. Other application areas like X-ray imaging may also benefit from this development

INTEGRATED CIRCUITS FOR HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS EXPERIMETNS

Integrated Circuits are used in most people\u2019s lives in the modern societies. An important branch of research and technology is focused on Integrated Circuit (IC) design, fabrication, and their efficient applications; moreover most of these activities are about commercial productions with applications in ambient environment. However the ICs play very important role in very advance research fields, as Astronomy or High Energy Physics experiments, with absolutely extreme environments which require very interdisciplinary research orientations and innovative solutions. For example, the Fast TracKer (FTK) electronic system, which is an important part of triggering system in ATLAS experiment at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in every second of experiment selects 200 interesting events among 40 millions of total events due to collision of accelerated protons. The FTK function is based on ICs which work as Content Addressable Memory (CAM). A CAM compares the income data with stored data and gives the addresses of matching data as an output. The amount of calculation in FTK system is out of capacity of commercial ICs even in very advanced technologies, therefore the development of innovative ICs is required. The high power consumption due to huge amount of calculation was an important limitation which is overcome by an innovative architecture of CAM in this dissertation. The environment of ICs application in astrophysics and High Energy Physics experiments is different from commercial ICs environment because of high amount of radiation. This fact started to get seriously attention after the first \u201cTelstar I\u201d satellite failure because of electronic damages due to radiation effects in space, and opened a new field of research mostly about radiation hard electronics. The multidisciplinary research in radiation hard electronic field is about radiation effects on semiconductors and ICs, deep understanding about the radiation in the extreme environments, finding alternative solutions to increase the radiation tolerance of electronic components, and development of new simulation method and test techniques. Chapter 2 of this dissertation is about the radiation effects on Silicon and ICs. Moreover, In this chapter, the terminologies of radiation effects on ICs are explained. In chapter 3, the space and high energy physics experiments environments, which are two main branches of radiation hard electronics research, are studied. The radiation tolerance in on-chip circuits is achieving by two kinds of methodology: Radiation Hardening By Process (RHBP) and Radiation Hardening By Design (RHBD). RHBP is achieved by changing the conventional fabrication process of commercial ICs. RHBP is very expensive so it is out of budget for academic research, and in most cases it is exclusive for military application, with very restricted rules which make the access of non-military organizations impossible. RHBD with conventional process is the approach of radiation hard IC design in this dissertation. RHBD at hardware level can be achieved in different ways: \u2022 System level RHBD: radiation hardening at system level is achieved by algorithms which are able to extract correct data using redundant information. \u2022Architecture level RHBD: some hardware architectures are able to prevent of lost data or mitigate the radiation effects on stored data without interfacing of software. Error Correction Code (ECC) circuits and Dual Interlocked storage CEll (DICE) architecture are two examples of RHBD at architecture level. \u2022 Circuit level RHBD: at circuit level, some structures are avoided or significantly reduced. For example, feedback loops with high gain are very sensitive to radiation effects. \u2022 Layout level RHBD: there are also different solutions in layout design level to increase the radiation tolerance of circuits. Specific shapes of transistor design, optimization of the physical distance between redundant data and efficient polarization of substrate are some techniques commonly used to increase significantly the radiation tolerance of ICs. An innovative radiation hard Static Random Access Memory (SRAM), designed in three versions, is presented in chapter 4. The radiation hardening is achieved by RHBD approach simultaneously at architecture, circuit and layout levels. Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) 65 nm is the technology of design and the prototype chip is fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Chapter 5 is about the development of simulation models that can help to predict the radiation effect in the behavior of SRAM block. The setup system developed to characterize the radiation hard SRAM prototype chip is presented in Chapter 5. The setup system gives the possibility of testing the prototype exposed under radiation in a vacuum chamberand regular laboratory environment. Chapter 6 is about the contribution of this dissertation on FTK project and the conclusion of all research activities is shown in the final part of this dissertation. The research activities of this dissertation in supported by Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) as part of CHIPIX65 project and RD53 collaboration at CERN

Low power design of a versatile analog mixed Signal sensor module

The development of space electronics especially for launcher such as Ariane 6 has to fulfill space standards and space requirements provided by the space industries. The standards of the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) are used extensively to ensure a development process that meets the space requirements. This standard covers space project management, space product assurance and space engineering. The ECSS is a cooperative effort of the European Space Agency, national Space Agencies and European Industry Associations for the purpose of developing and maintaining common standards. The work presented in this dissertation was carried out to fill the gap of developing wireless sensor network for Ariane launchers. The development process follows the space requirements that demand the sensor node to survive the environmental condition inside the launcher. This makes the work uniquely compared to commercial wireless sensor network development. The versatile analog mixed signal module proposed in this work consists of infrared transmitter, VLC receiver, power management, data processing with digital/analog sensor interface unit and solar cell as energy harvester. The sensor module is used to build wireless sensor network inside the Vehicle Equipment Bay (VEB) of Ariane 5

Design of a rad-hard library of digital cells for space applications

This paper proposes a design methodology for a digital library of cells resistant to cosmic radiation. Most important e\ufb00ects due to radiation are avoided or mitigated using ad hoc design techniques. Fault injection techniques are used to validate the design. Simulations results demonstrate that the cells designed in a 180 nm CMOS technology are tolerant to 1.5 mA current peak due to interaction with a single high-energy particle