Radiation Hardening By Design

Chips are exposed to energetic particles, but in some applications, such as space, the dose of particles is high and hazardous. Protons, ions, neutrons, alpha/beta/gamma particles, and X-rays might degrade the performance, shorten the lifetime, and might cause hard or soft failures.

The lecture will describe the failure mechanisms and key mitigation techniques. The common mechanisms are TID, SEL, SEU, but there are additional mechanisms that might affect special applications. It is typically not practical to eliminate the failures, but it is practical and achievable to mitigate them significantly.

Mitigating the radiation effects can be done by process, architecture/logic/circuit/layout design, by software/firmware, and by system level mechanical/hardware/software techniques. The key techniques will be presented. The most common mitigation technique, which is implemented during the chip design flow, is named Radiation Hardening By Design (RHBD). This is the main scope of the lecture.

Advanced semiconductor technologies are inherently more immune to radiation effects. However, some circuits, especially those operate at relatively high voltage, might be under-protected, unless mitigated by simple design techniques. Some tips will be provided.

Biography: 

Tuvia Liran had >40 years of experience in VLSI development, including analog & digital design, process, testing, Q&R, packaging and more. He wrote 15 patents, mostly on VLSI circuits.

He graduated Bsc in physics, and EE and Msc in electronics from the Technion in the eighties, and since then he was in VLSI industry, and mentoring projects in VLSI lab.

He was co-founder of Ramon.Space, where he was responsible, as CTO, for the development of the technologies for space applications. The components demonstrated extremely high immunity to all radiation effects, and company’s products had been selected for many space missions, including missions to Mars, Asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Sun, and many satellites.

He served as navigator in IAF during his military service.

Registration is required. The Zoom link will be sent after registration.

The webinar will be in Hebrew.

Register Here: https://acrc.net.technion.ac.il/registration-for-acrc-webinar-radiation-hardening-by-design-rhbd/