Practicality of Single Event Effects Detection using thin-films: A Study

Single Event Effects are errors in electronic circuits caused by cosmic particles present in the natural environment. The result of a particle strike may corrupt the logical state at a target node or cause erroneous glitches. In most instances, the errors are random and non-destructive. The severity of these errors, however, cannot be discounted as exemplified by commercial instances [21, 22]. Particles from the outer space interact with the atmosphere to produce a cascade of secondary particles [2]. At ground level, neutrons dominate the particle composition [13]. However, alpha particles also significantly contribute to these errors. Since alpha particles can be easily shielded, only their on-chip sources are of importance [4]. At sea-level, the particle flux distribution of neutrons varies significantly across neutron energy [1, 13]. Two regions of this distribution are of particular interest; the neutrons at thermal energies (<1 eV), which account for almost 33% of all available neutrons, and high-energy (>1 MeV) neutrons (HEN) which constitute over 60% of all available neutrons. Since neutrons are electrically neutral, they do not cause ionization. Instead they are either absorbed or scattered by a target nucleus. The result of this is an ionizing particle. Ionizing particles, like alpha particles and heavy ions, create charge carriers in their traveling media by ionizing target atoms. If sufficient charge is collected in the active region, the logical state at that node could be altered [4]. Current techniques such as redundancy by duplication and radiation hardening are expensive [3]. For example, redundancy is needed to detect particle induced errors for random logic. Compared to circuit operations, particle impacts are extremely rare, making redundancy a very ineffective means of error detection. In thesis, the idea of directly detecting the incoming particle via a thin-film structure is explored.