A summary review of displacement damage from high energy radiation in silicon semiconductors and semiconductor devices

High-energy radiation produces defect complexes in semiconductor materials which reduce minority carrier lifetime, change majority carrier density, and reduce mobility. Most of the experimental data on semiconductors and semiconductor devices have been taken using high-energy neutrons. Recent research has shown that these data can be extrapolated to other high-energy radiation by normalizing to the energy involved in atomic processes. Minority carrier lifetime is the most sensitive electronic property of silicon in the neutron environment. The degradation of minority carrier lifetime results in changes in semiconductor device properties. Carrier removal, the next most important characteristic of displacement damage, causes a decrease in carrier mobility and an increase resistivity. The dependence of these basic semiconductor properties on neutron fluence is introduced into device models such as SPICE and the resulting radiation inclusive model permits quantitative determination of device parameters as a function of neutron fluence. The displacement damage concepts have been developed most extensively for silicon but can be readily extended to other semiconductors