Radiation effects on electronic devices represent a major concern in applications for harsh environments, such as aerospace and nuclear facilities. This article presents a review of fundamental aspects of radiation effects on semiconductors, with a primary focus on Single-Event Effects. It discusses charge collection models, destructive effects, applications in detectors, and impacts on digital devices, drawing from recent research findings.

The vulnerability of prominent silicon-based U-shaped Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (UMOSFET) to destructive radiation effects when operating in terrestrial atmospheric environments is addressed. It is known that secondary particles from nuclear reactions between atmospheric neutrons and the constituent materials of electronic devices can trigger Single-Event Burnout (SEB) destructive failure in power MOSFETs. The susceptibility of UMOSFETs to SEBs induced by atmospheric neutrons in accelerated tests are compared to that of similarly rated traditional Double-diffused MOSFET (DMOSFET) counterparts. Computational simulations are conducted to elucidate failure mechanisms and propose strategies to potentially enhance the survivability of next-generation UMOSFETs in high-reliability power systems operating on Earth.

In this work, measurements were taken to investigate the robustness of a GaN HEMT to TID by a 60CO Source. These results will be compared with a previous X-ray based work. The robustness was investigated through IxV curves and characteristic parameters of the irradiated device. The analysis included data acquired both from on- and off- state modes. The work concludes that the device is robust to TID, as it quickly recovered important parameters. Mainly, the on-state mode, which presented a better performance compared to the off-mode. An analogous behavior was seen for X-ray. Finally, the VTH values due to the TID, in this device is independent of the dose rate and the radiation source.

This study examines the performance of two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) designed for aerial image classification in the presence of radiation-induced bit-flips. We modify these CNNs by adjusting parameters such as quantization and parallelism to facilitate their implementation using the FINN inference engine, which is optimized for the AMD/Xilinx FPGAs. The aim is to evaluate the impact of different quantization levels, network topologies, and architectural parallelism on area, computational performance, and reliability in the presence of soft-errors. Emulated fault injection and heavy ion irradiation were performed. The results indicate that the same CNN topology can exhibit up to a 2.7× difference in Mean Fluence to Failure (MΦTF) by altering quantization and architectural parallelism. The findings demonstrate that higher dependability can be obtained by carefully combining a suitable CNN topology with optimized quantization and architectural parallelism.

The trench gate or U-groove MOSFET (UMOSFET) has become widely adopted as a semiconductor device globally, gradually replacing the traditional vertical double-diffused MOSFET (DMOSFET) in many applications. Evaluating the reliability of UMOSFETs regarding neutron-induced radiation effects is crucial for understanding their response to ubiquitous atmospheric neutrons. This study presents comparative experimental and computational results of Single-Event Effects induced by monoenergetic fast neutrons in UMOS and DMOS power transistors. Experiments demonstrate that UMOSFETs exhibit premature particle-induced avalanche multiplication effects compared to similarly rated DMOSFETs, which may favor destructive radiation effects, such as Single-Event Burnout, when operating in the terrestrial radiation environment.

This work investigates the impact of neutron and heavy ion radiation-induced soft errors on Arm Cortex-M Systems-on-Chip and proposes a fault injection methodology designed for the early assessment of these effects on the embedded processors. Our methodology is then employed to assess the effectiveness of software design exploration and implementing fault tolerance techniques. We connect heavy ion and neutron radiation experiments and emulate fault injections for applications running on these resource-constrained low-cost processors. Our case studies include benchmark scenarios with bare-metal applications and the FreeRTOS operating system, tailored for deployment in small satellite missions. Results show that our proposed methodology presents reliability curves that align with those obtained from the radiation experiments.