Neutron-Induced Ionizing Effects at High Flux in Deep Submicron CMOS Integrated Circuits

Neutron radiation causes ionizing-energy loss (IEL) and non-ionizing-energy loss (NIEL) in materials, and the deposition of ionizing-energy excites electron–hole pairs, causing ionizing radiation effects in semiconductor devices. Reactor neutron-irradiation experiments on 130 nm CMOS integrated circuits were carried out, and it was found that secondary ionization induced a local latch-up effect that would occur in 130 nm CMOS integrated circuits when the neutron fluence reached 1010–1011/cm2 under high-reactor-neutron-flux irradiation. Geant4 was used to calculate IEL and NIEL of 1–14 MeV neutrons in the sensitive region of a 130 nm transistor and IEL collected the charge generated by IEL under the neutron spectrum conditions of the reactor. The range of the sensitive region, ionizing-charge distribution and charge-collection mechanism inside the device were analyzed in depth by combining experiment and simulation. The results provide an important reference for the study of the radiation effects of high neutron-flux in CMOS devices with smaller feature sizes.