Long-Term Transient Radiation Effects in SOI CMOS RF ICs

This paper presents the study of transient radiation effects in SOI CMOS RF IC´s and discrete MOS transistors. Experiments show that the sensitivity of SOI RF IC´s (gain blocks, mixers, VCO etc.) to transient irradiations (dose rate) is mainly determined by the transient response of RF characteristics i.e. output power, output frequency, power / conversion gain, rather than supply transient photocurrent. SOI VCO demonstrates a minimal threshold dose rate (upset-free level) below than 109 rad(Si)/s, limited by the output frequency variations of ±20% and recovery time up to 100 μs with a maximum dose rate of 5×1012 rad(Si)/s. It is also shown that the long-term transient recovery of the RF characteristics and super-linear dependence of the supply photocurrent vs dose rate are the dominating transient radiation effects in SOI CMOS RF IC´s.