Soft error rate analysis based on multiple sensitive volume model using PHITS

Figures & data

Figure 1. Configuration of the NMOSFET structure equivalent to 25-nm design rule used in HyENEXSS [5,6,9]. STI (shallow trench isolation) prevents electrical current leakage between adjacent transistors, and active area is the area surrounded by STI.

Table 1. Parameters of NMOSFET for 25-nm design rule [18–20].

Gate length (nm)	25
Gate oxide thickness (nm)	1.5
Active area length (nm)	175
Active area width (nm)	98
STI depth (nm)	250
Substrate volume (μm^3)	20 μm × 10 μm × 10 μm
Bias voltage of drain (V)	0.9

Figure 2. I_d–V_g curve for NMOSFET. In general, I_d is sufficiently small at off-state of V_g. I_d increases drastically together with V_g, and then increases moderately when V_g reaches a certain level.

Figure 3. Time evolution of electron density, hole density and potential for drain-node struck by ion with a track length of 0.1 μm. The potential is distorted along with the ion track, and reverts to normal at 43.1 ps. At 0.207 ps, electrons are pulled out from the source node to the substrate side.

Figure 4. Drain currents in NMOSFET as a function of time and for various ion-track lengths.

Figure 5. Charge collection efficiency for drain-node struck and source-node struck plotted as a function of ion-track length.

Figure 6. Charge collection efficiency for several positions of spherical charge plotted as a function of distance between spherical charge and center of transistor surface.

Figure 7. Configuration of computational system used in PHITS. For the MSV model, the analysis volume is divided into regions A and B, which are then subdivided into smaller SVs. For the SSV model, an SV is placed on the analysis volume.

Figure 8. SERs as a function of critical charge calculated by PHYSERD, PHITS+SSV and PHITS+MSV.

Figure 9. Impact of incident neutron energy ranges on SER obtained by (A) PHYSERD, (B) PHITS+SSV and (C) PHITS+MSV.

Figure 10. Impact of secondary ion species on SER obtained by (A) PHYSERD, (B) PHITS+SSV and (C) PHITS+MSV.

Figure 11. Event distribution of relative collected charges obtained by PHITS+SSV and by PHITS+MSV. Each histogram is normalized to unity.

Abe S, Watanabe Y. Neutron-induced soft error analysis in MOSFETs from a 65 nm to a 25 nm design rule using multi-scale Monte Carlo simulation method. Proceedings of International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS 2012); 2012 Apr 15–19; Anaheim, CA.

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Abe S, Ogata R, Watanabe Y. Impact of nuclear reaction models on neutron-induced soft error rate analysis. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci. 2014;61:1806–1812.

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Abe S, Watanabe Y. Analysis of charge deposition and collection caused by low energy neutrons in a 25-nm bulk CMOS technology. IEEE Trans Nucl Sci. 2014;61:3519–3526..

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