TCAD Simulation of Radiation Effects on 180 nm Logic Inverters

This work presents a physically based simulation evaluation of the effects of single ionizing particles and displacement damage on logic inverter gates in a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) with 180 nm structure size. A technology computer-aided-design (TCAD) model is combined with a radiation model to allow the simulation of charged particles with a linear energy transfer (LET) between 1 and 100 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\frac{M e V \cdot c m^{2}}{m g}$</tex>. For displacement damage simulation, proton energies between 1 and 10 MeV and neutron energies between 1.6 and 14 MeV have been evaluated to estimate the resulting transistor threshold voltages.