Effects of Proton Irradiation on 60 GHz CMOS Transceiver Chip for Multi-Gbps Communication in High-Energy Physics Experiments

TL;DR

This study evaluates the radiation hardness of a 60 GHz CMOS transceiver chip for high-energy physics experiments, demonstrating its operational capability at 5 Gbps after proton irradiation with minimal frequency shift.

Contribution

First experimental analysis of 60 GHz CMOS transceiver performance under proton irradiation for high-energy physics applications.

Findings

Chips remained operational at 5 Gbps post-irradiation

Minor performance degradation observed after irradiation

Small frequency shift detected after proton exposure

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental results of $17~MeV$ proton irradiation on a $60~GHz$ low power, half-duplex transceiver (TRX) chip implemented in $65~nm$ CMOS technology. It supports short range point-to-point data rate up to $6~Gbps$ by employing on-off keying (OOK). To investigate the irradiation hardness for high energy physics applications, two TRX chips were irradiated with total ionizing doses (TID) of $74~kGy$ and $42~kGy$ and fluence of $1.4~\times$10$^{14}~ N_{eq}/cm^2$ and $0.8~\times$10$^{14}~N_{eq}/cm^2$ for RX and TX modes, respectively. The chips were characterized by pre- and post-irradiation analogue voltage measurements on different circuit blocks as well as through the analysis of wireless transmission parameters like bit error rate (BER), eye diagram, jitter etc. Post-irradiation measurements have shown certain reduction in performance but both TRX chips have been found operational through over the air measurements at $5~Gbps$. Moreover, very small shift in the carrier frequency was observed after the irradiation.