Impact of Aging Degradation on Heavy-ion SEU Response of 28 nm UTBB FD-SOI Technology

Integrated circuits (ICs) are a keystone for most critical applications operating in high-level radiation environments, spanning from high-energy nuclear applications up to space applications. The long-term reliability of these applications is essential for safe operation. However, the radiation effects for ICs are commonly investigated using fresh circuits, leaving the coupled effect of radiation and aging degradation unknown. This article investigates the impact of negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) aging degradation mechanism on the heavy-ion single event upset (SEU) radiation susceptibility of 28-nm ultrathin body and buried oxide (UTBB) fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) technology using a custom-designed test vehicle. NBTI aging degradation mechanism has been experimentally proven to increase the SEU sensitivity up to 2x for 28-nm UTBB FD-SOI flip-flops. A comprehensive framework is presented to analyze the underlying mechanisms for the impact of NBTI, which includes NBTI aging mechanism modeling, SEU SPICE simulation, TCAD irradiation simulation, and Monte-Carlo simulation of radiation effects. The framework offered a quantitative prediction of the effect of NBTI degradation mechanism on the heavy-ion SEU radiation sensitivity.