Experimental method for determining the supply current of a PMOS power transistor for use as a RADFET dosimeter

Radiation Sensitive MOSFETs (RADFETs) have been commonly used as ionizing radiation dosimeters. The threshold voltage variation is the main transistor parameter used for radiation dosimetry, as this voltage variation is directly related to total dose and it can be easily determined by using simple measurement and biasing circuits. In this work it is presented a novel experimental method to determine the optimal drain-source current value to be supplied to a p-type MOSFET used in a traditional RADFET configuration (diode connected transistor) for monitoring of the accumulated X- and gamma-radiation dose. Experimental results from irradiations with 60Co gamma-rays and comparison measurements with semiconductor analyzer indicate that lower supply current values result in more precise dose measurement results

Testing a fault tolerant mixed-signal design under TID and heavy ions

This work presents results of three distinctradiation tests performed upon a fault tolerant data acqui-sition system comprising a design diversity redundancytechnique. The first and second experiments are Total Ion-izing Dose (TID) essays, comprising gamma and X-rayirradiations. The last experiment considers single eventeffects, in which two heavy ion irradiation campaignsare carried out. The case study system comprises threeanalog-to-digital converters and two software-based vot-ers, besides additional software and hardware resourcesused for controlling, monitoring and memory manage-ment. The applied Diversity Triple Modular Redundancy(DTMR) technique, comprises different levels of diversity(temporal and architectural). The circuit was designed ina programmable System-on-Chip (PSoC), fabricated in a130nm CMOS technology process. Results show that thetechnique may increase the lifetime of the system underTID if comparing with a non-redundant implementation.Considering the heavy ions experiments the system wasproved effective to tolerate 100% of the observed errorsoriginated in the converters, while errors in the process-ing unit present a higher criticality. Critical errors occur-ring in one of the voters were also observed. A secondheavy ion campaign was then carried out to investigatethe voters reliability, comparing the the dynamic cross sec-tion of three different software-based voter schemes im-plemented in the considered PSoC

Analyzing the effects of TID in an embedded system running in a flash-based FPGA

This work analyzes the behavior of a designed embedded system composed of microprocessor, memories and SpaceWire (SpW) links under Total Ionizing Dose (TID) synthesized into a commercial flash-based FPGA from Actel. Two tests were performed: one the FPGA is configured just once at the beginning of the irradiation and the other the FPGA is reconfigured every 5 krad (Si). Results evaluate power supply current (Icc), temperature, function operation and performance degradation

Characterisation of microbial attack on archaeological bone

As part of an EU funded project to investigate the factors influencing bone preservation in the archaeological record, more than 250 bones from 41 archaeological sites in five countries spanning four climatic regions were studied for diagenetic alteration. Sites were selected to cover a range of environmental conditions and archaeological contexts. Microscopic and physical (mercury intrusion porosimetry) analyses of these bones revealed that the majority (68%) had suffered microbial attack. Furthermore, significant differences were found between animal and human bone in both the state of preservation and the type of microbial attack present. These differences in preservation might result from differences in early taphonomy of the bones. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved