RF electronics
1. Literature study on Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects on 22-nm Fully-Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (FD-SOI) technology
· As envisaged in the research work plan, the first 1-2 years of the project will focus on foundational research and preliminary experimental work concerning radiation effects at the RF device level.
· A comprehensive literature study has been conducted on the target technology, e.g. 22-nm FD-SOI, revealing three main effects: threshold voltage (VTH) shift, a consequent increase in leakage current (Ileak), reduction in the DC transconductance (gm), and a sub-threshold slope degradation.
· Since most results that are published on this experiment are limited to DC measurements, an accompanying literature study was also conducted on TID effects on the RF performance, but for other SOI technologies, due to limits imposed by the literature that is available. Based on these results, and inferring from the published data on the DC degradation of the target device, a reduction in the cut-off frequency (fT) and maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) may be anticipated.
2. TID campaign using gamma radiation for radiation-hardness characterization on RF performance of 22-nm FD-SOI
· Based on the literature study conducted, a TID experiment has already been designed to subject our transistor samples to gamma irradiation at the UCLouvain Cyclotron Resource Center (CRC). The experiment is scheduled on March 2026.
· The goal of the experiment is to separate and quantify the effects of Qox and Nit by using post-irradiation controlled annealing and back-gate bias (VBB) sweeps which are a critical feature of FD-SOI. From a broader perspective, this experiment aims to evaluate the RF performance of the target technology for frequency synchronization applications in CubeSats.
