Pulse Quenching and Charge-Sharing Effects on Heavy-Ion Microbeam Induced ASET in a Full-Custom CMOS OpAmp

Abstract

In this work, charge sharing effects on Analog Single Event Transients are experimentally observed in a fully-custom designed, 180nm CMOS Operational Amplifier by means of a heavy-ion microbeam. Sensitive nodes of the differential stage showed bipolar output transients that cannot be explained by single node collection for the closed loop characteristics of the circuit under test. Layout of these transistors are consistent with charge sharing effects due to deposited charge diffusion. Implementation of linear modeling and simulations of multiple node collection between paired transistors of the input stage showed great coincidence with the obtained experimental waveforms, shaped as bipolar, quenched pulses. These effects are also observed due to dummy transistors placed in the layout.A simple parametrization at the simulation level is proposed to reproduce the observed experimental waveforms. Results indicate that charge-sharing effects should be taken into account during simulation-based sensitivity evaluation of analog circuits, as pulse quenching can alter the obtained results, and linear modeling is a simple approach to emulate simultaneous charge collection in multiple nodes by applying superposition principles, with aims of hardening a design.

Pulse quenching based radiation-hardened by design technique for analog single-event transient mitigation on an operational amplifier in 28 nm bulk CMOS process

“…As shown in figure 7, the pulse quenching between the adjacent PMOSs depends on charge sharing collection, which can be classified into diffusion and bipolar amplification effect [15]. The diffusion process distributes the excess carriers throughout well/substrate and all of the adjacent nodes have the opportunity to collect the charges.…”

“…Sensitive node active charge cancellation (SNACC) technique [13,14] utilizes charge sharing to compensate injected charge at critical nodes in analog and mixed-signal circuits, which causes large area penalty and complicates system's design. Fontana et al [15] experimentally observed charge sharing between paired transistors in operational amplifier and provided linear modeling to simplify emulate simultaneous charge collection in differential data path.…”

Heavy-ion induced analog SET impact on inter-stage inductor low noise amplifiers at 10 and 30 GHz frequencies

“…The astronomy applications have been ruled by semiconductor based devices that are mostly susceptible to radiation phenomenon. The SEE investigation have been done in the previous literatures such as full-custom CMOS op-amp, Delta-Sigma modulators, Comparators, DC/DC power converters, high-speed current feedback amplifier [10][11][12][13][14]. A new scaling trend allows the RF CMOS technology to work in the giga-hertz of range applications, which is used to compete with other technology contenders, for instance SiGe, BiCMOS and III-IV technology.…”