ABSTRACTThe radiation hardness of small geometry (∼2 × 4 μm2), state of the art AlInAs/lnGaAs and GaAs/AlGaAs HBTs to 60Co γ-ray has been investigated up to a dose of 100 MRad. The former devices showed a small change in Ic and gain for 20 MRad, with essentially no change in IB. At 40 MRad, the gain of the devices had decreased to unity. By contrast, for GaAs/AlGaAs HBTs, the current gain actually increased up to a dose of 75 MRad. At 100 MRad, none of our devices were still operational. This was ascribed to degradation of the base-collector contact metallization (TiPtAu) and in particular to the presence of Au. Carbon-and beryllium-doped base devices showed the same response to 60Co γ-ray doses. No long transient responses in either base or collector currents were observed during irradiation of the GaAs/AlGaAs devices with 120 nsec pulses of 10 MeV electrons at rates up to 2.7 × 1010 Rad · sec−1. Results of a 2-dimensional modelling study suggest that both GaAs and InP based HBTs are relatively immune to damage by transient radiation effects up to a dose rate of 1011 Rad · sec−1, with GaAs based devices being more resistant to radiation than InP due to their shorter recombination times.
The influence of high ionizing dose rate on CMOS IC radiation hardness used in da-ta transmission elements