Effect of Gamma Radiation on Single and Triple Gate Device: TCAD Simulation

Abstract

Due to the advancement in the scaling of microelectronics technology, different device architectures such as double and multi gate devices were proposed. To overcome short channel effects arising due to scaling, triple gate FinFET device seems to be a promising candidate. The application of electronic devices is found in different radiation environment such as military, medical, space, and nuclear explosive environments. These electronic devices operating in radiation environment suffer from reliability issues and degradation in its performance parameters including change in threshold voltage, increase in leakage current, and increase in subthreshold slope. There are various radiation sources like alpha, gamma, and X rays, and high energy particles like electron, neutron, proton, and heavy ions present in different radiation environment. Hence, it has become necessary to explore the radiation hardness and reliability of specific devices to understand the failure mechanism and radiation response to predict the device behavior in radiation ambient. In this work, firstly, the performance of long channel single gate device (conventional MOSFET) is investigated under gamma radiation by varying the dose of the radiation. It was found that device parameters are significantly affected by gamma radiation with leakage currents increasing with increasing dose. Device leakage current was increased by four orders of magnitude for radiation dose of 11 Mrad. These changes in device parameters may lead to failure. In the second part of work, effect of gamma radiation is investigated on device parameters of a triple gate device (FinFET) with 32 nm gate length. This study suggests that the effect of gamma radiation on FinFET is not significant for practical applications.