Speaker
Dr
Robert Weller
(ISDE/Vanderbilt University)
Description
Microelectronic devices are sensitive to ionizing radiation, and with the scaling of devices to ever-smaller dimensions, they are increasingly vulnerable to single event effects. Single event effects are transient errors in active devices — usually although not exclusively in digital circuits — that are caused by the interaction of ionizing particles with the device materials. This presentation will describe the program MRED, a Geant4-based Monte Carlo engine for predicting the rate of single event effects from knowledge of radiation environments and device structure. The approach embodied in MRED combines detailed physical modeling of discrete radiation events, semiconductor device simulation to estimate charge transport and collection, and circuit simulation to determine the macroscopic electrical effects of the collected charge. Details of the Monte Carlo simulation will be presented, and a mathematical analysis that establishes its relationship to earlier single event rate prediction methods will be discussed. The relationship between MRED and the publicly available web site CRÈME-MC will be described.
Primary author
Dr
Robert Weller
(ISDE/Vanderbilt University)
Co-authors
Brian Sierawski
(ISDE/Vanderbilt University)
Marcus Mendenhall
(Vanderbilt University)
Dr
Robert Reed
(ISDE/Vanderbilt University)