River Publishers Rad-hard Analog ICs (River Publishers Series in Electronic Materials, Circuits and Devices)

The book is intended for researchers and professionals interested in understanding how to design and make a preliminary characterization of Radiation Hardened (rad-hard) analog and mixed-signal circuits, exploiting standard CMOS manufacturing processes available from different silicon foundries and using different technology nodes. It starts with an introductory overview of the effects of radiation in space and harsh environments with a specific focus on analog circuits to enable the reader to understand why specific design solutions are adopted to mitigate hard/soft errors. The following four Chapters are devoted to RHBD (Radiation Hardening by Design) techniques for semiconductor components applied to Operational Amplifiers, Voltage References, Analog-to-Digital (ADC) and Digital-to-Analog (DAC) converters. Each Chapter is organized with a first part which recalls the basic working principles of such circuit and a second part which describes the main RHBD techniques proposed in the literature to make them resilient to radiation. The approach follows a top-down scheme starting from RHBD at circuit level (how to mitigate radiation effects by handling transistors in the proper way) and finishing at layout level (how to shape a layout to mitigate radiation effects). The last-but-one Chapter is devoted to a special class of analog circuit, the dosimeters, which are gaining importance in space, health and nuclear applications. By leveraging the characteristic of a Flash-memory cell, a re-usable dosimeter is described which includes the sensitive element itself, the analog interface and the process of characterization. The last part is an overview of the strategies adopted for the testing of analog and mixed-signal circuits. In particular, it will focus also on the measurement campaigns performed by the Authors aiming for the characterization of developed rad-hard components under total dose (TID) and single-events (SEE). Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Radiation effects on semiconductor components (TID, SEE) • Radiation Hardening by Design (RHBD) Techniques • Rad-hard Operational Amplifiers • Rad-hard Voltage References • Rad-hard ADC • Rad-hard DAC • Rad-hard Special Circuits • Testing Strategies About the Author Dr. Umberto Gatti was born in Pavia (Italy) in 1962. He received the Laurea and the Ph.D. degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pavia in 1987 and 1992, respectively. From 1993 to 1999, he worked in the R&D Lab of Italtel, as ASIC Designer, being involved in modeling analog ICs. In 1999, he joined the Development Technologies Lab of Siemens, where he was Sr. Design ASIC Engineer. Besides developing telecom ICs, he was the coordinator of Eureka-Medea+ projects focused on high-speed sigma-delta converters. In 2008, he moved to Nokia Siemens Networks where he worked as Sr. Power Supply Architect. Since 2012 he is with RedCat Devices as member of the Executive Staff and also hold co-operation with the University of Pavia. During his career, he was involved in the design of data-converters, broadband wireless transceivers, Hall sensors micro-systems and power supply architectures. His current research interests are in the area of rad-hard CMOS ICs, particularly rad-hard libraries and memories (SRAMs and OTP), rad-hard mixed-signal circuits (ADC-DAC), dosimeters, and in testing such components. He holds 2 international patents and is co-author of about 60 papers, one book and books chapters. He is Senior Member of IEEE and serves also as reviewer for magazines and conferences. Cristiano Calligaro received the laurea degree in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronics and Information Engineering from the University of Pavia (Italy) in 1992 and 1997 respectively. After obtaining the Ph.D. degree he moved to MAPP Technology. In 2006 he established RedCat Devices as a start-up. During his career he has been involved in memory design (volatile a