Strong Proton-Defect Interaction in Synergistic Irradiation Damage System

TL;DR

This study reveals a strong proton-defect interaction in synergistic irradiation damage, demonstrating its significant role alongside Coulomb interactions in affecting silicon device degradation under ionizing radiation.

Contribution

It uncovers and models a previously unexplored proton-defect interaction mechanism that influences damage response in silicon devices under irradiation.

Findings

Damage decreases then increases with dose due to proton-defect interactions.

Proton-defect interaction is as significant as injection annealing effects.

A new model describes dose-rate and defect-dependent damage behavior.

Abstract

We experimentally investigated total ionizing dose (TID) response of the input-stage PNP transitor in an operational amplifier LM324N with various initial displacement damage (IDD). We found that, the damage first decreases and then increases with the total dose, which can be exactly described by a dose-rate-dependent linear generation term, an IDD-dependent linear annealing term, and a dose-rate-dependent exponential annealing term. We demonstrate that, the first two terms are the well-known TID and injection annealing effect, respectively, while the third term stems from the reactions between the TID-induced protons diffusing from silica and the defects generated in silicon, which implies the presence of a unexplored proton-defect interaction between TID and DD effects. Moreover, we find that such an interaction is as strong as the injection annealing. Our work show that, beside the well-known Coulomb interaction of trapping charge in silica with carriers in silicon, a strong proton-defect interaction also plays important role in the synergistic damage.