Radiation Hardening by Applying Substrate Bias

A reverse substrate bias is known to increase the threshold voltage and reduce the off-state leakage current, which is of great interest from a radiation perspective in space applications. In this work, substrate biases during both irradiation and post-irradiation test on the impacts of total ionizing dose effects in a 180 nm CMOS technology are studied. The results indicate that a negative substrate bias during irradiation impairs the radiation hardness while a negative substrate bias during post-irradiation test improves the radiation hardness for nMOS transistors. A simple model is proposed to discuss the net result including the both effects. We find that the substrate bias for radiation hardening does not always work in some special conditions, such as the device with very low body doping and the STI which is very sensitive to the electric field for the buildup of charge.