Figure 1: Simulation results: electrostatic potential of an N-type MOS transistor before and after irradiation, simulated with Sentaurus TCAD.
Reliability is a wide-ranging subject in microelectronics, covering responses to different kinds of stress as well as measures to increase devices' tolerance against them. This includes ionising radiation stress, which affects device characteristics, leading to circuit degradation. Investigating such problems, as well as irradiation campaigns with custom integrated circuits (ICs) are the day-to-day focus of the team at the Institute of Electronics. Analog IC design is an integral part of microelectronics. Designers have a host of options when it comes to meeting specifications, they need to make decisions on trade-offs between different parameters, and also need to comply with strict requirements in terms of precision, fast timing and low noise. It becomes even more challenging when reliability issues, such as ionising radiation stress, come into play. It is this combination that makes research into radiation-hard integrated circuit design so exciting.
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