A Low-Power and In Situ Annealing Technique for the Recovery of Active Devices After Proton Irradiation

Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics, and Applied Mathematics, Université catholique de Louvain, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium
Department of Engineering, Electrical Engineering Division, University of Cambridge, 9 JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0FA, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Cambridge CMOS Sensors Ltd, Deanland House, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0DL, United Kingdom

e-mail: laurent.francis@uclouvain.be nicolas.andre@uclouvain.be valeria.kilchytska@uclouvain.be pierre.gerard@uclouvain.be denis.flandre@uclouvain.be sedkiamor@gmail.com
e-mail: florin.udrea@ucam.uk
e-mail: zeeshan.ali@ccmoss.com

Published online: 10 January 2018

Abstract

In this paper, we study the recovery of onmembrane semiconductor components, such as N-type Field-Effect Transistors (FETs) available in two different channel widths and a Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) inverter, after the exposure to high dose of proton radiation. Due to the ionizing effect, the electrical characteristics of the components established remarkable shifts, where the threshold voltages showed an average shift of -480 mV and -280 mV respectively for 6 μm and 24 μm N-channel transistors, likewise the inversion point of the inverter showed an important shift of -690 mV. The recovery concept is based mainly on a micro-hotplate, fabricated with backside MEMS micromachining structure and a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) technology, ensuring rapid, low power and in situ annealing technique, this method proved its reliability in recent works. Annealing the N-channel transistors and the inverter for 16 min with a temperature of the heater up to 385 °C, guaranteed a partial recovery of the semiconductor based components with a maximum power consumption of 66 mW.