Monitoring of Particle Flux and LET Variations with Pulse Stretching Inverters

TL;DR

This paper presents a digital on-chip particle detector using pulse stretching inverters to monitor particle flux and LET variations, demonstrated through CMOS simulations showing significant pulse width changes over a wide LET range.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel digital particle detection method employing pulse stretching inverters for on-chip flux and LET monitoring, enabling LET variation sensing with purely digital logic.

Findings

SET pulse width varies by 550 ps over LET range 1-100 MeVcm2mg-1

Detector design uses cascaded CMOS inverters with parallel arrays for sensing

Simulation results validate the feasibility of digital LET monitoring

Abstract

This work investigates the use of pulse stretching inverters for monitoring the variation of flux and Linear Energy Transfer (LET) of energetic particles. The basic particle detector consists of two cascaded pulse stretching (skew-sized) inverters designed in CMOS technology, and the required sensing area is obtained by connecting multiple two-inverter pulse stretching cells in parallel, and employing the required number of parallel arrays. The particle strikes are detected in terms of the Single Event Transients (SETs), and the detector provides the information on the SET count rate and SET pulse width variation, from which the particle flux and LET can be determined. The main advantage of the proposed solution is the possibility to sense the LET variations using purely digital processing logic. The SPICE simulations done on IHP 130 nm bulk CMOS technology have shown that the SET pulse width at the output of detector changes by 550 ps over the LET range from 1 to 100 MeVcm2mg-1. The proposed solution is intended to operate as an on-chip particle detector within the self-adaptive multiprocessing systems.