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The charge deposition of particles in materials is the primary stage in inducing ionization radiation effects. We analyzed charge depositions of heavy ion, proton, and neutron in digital integrated circuit (IC) materials [i.e., C(diamond), Si, Ge, and GaAs] and power IC materials [i.e., C(diamond), Si, SiC, and GaN] in this paper. For proton and heavy ion direct ionizations, the maximum deposited charge per unit length [i.e., (dQ/dx)max] was extracted for comparisons among these materials. For proton and neutron indirect ionizations, the maximum recoil-deposited charge (i.e., Qdepmax) and the recoil numbers were used for comparisons. The deposited charge by the low-energy recoils was modeled by the ionization efficiencies which were obtained from transport of ions in matter Monte Carlo simulations. The influences of temperature and doping concentration were also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With technology scaling down, scale of the integrated circuit (IC) increases rapidly. It is unrealistic to harden every element in the IC, hence it is critical to evaluate relative single-event transient (SET) or single-event upset (SEU) sensitivity of each node in the IC to selectively harden the elements connected to the identified highly sensitive nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes a test circuit to measure the relative SET/SEU sensitivity of each node in any circuit working in real time. This will have significant implications for designing ICs with high reliability and low overheads. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]