State-of-the-Art Flash Chips for Dosimetry Applications

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that commercial 20 nm Flash memory chips are sensitive to ionizing radiation, with fail-bit counts increasing with dose, indicating potential for dosimetry applications.

Contribution

It reveals the radiation sensitivity of modern Flash chips and explores their potential use as dosimeters, a novel application for commercial memory technology.

Findings

Fail-bit count increases with gamma and X-ray dose

X-ray irradiated devices show more fail bits due to dose enhancement

Potential for using Flash chips as radiation dosimeters

Abstract

In this paper we show that state-of-the-art commercial off-the-shelf Flash memory chip technology (20 nm technology node with multi-level cells) is quite sensitive to ionizing radiation. We find that the fail-bit count in these Flash chips starts to increase monotonically with gamma or X-ray dose at 100 rad(SiO2). Significantly more fail bits are observed in X-ray irradiated devices, most likely due to dose enhancement effects due to high-Z back-end-of-line materials. These results show promise for dosimetry application.