Radiation Tolerant Electronics

Book excerpt: Research on radiation-tolerant electronics has increased rapidly over the past few years, resulting in many interesting approaches to modeling radiation effects and designing radiation-hardened integrated circuits and embedded systems. This research is strongly driven by the growing need for radiation-hardened electronics for space applications, high-energy physics experiments such as those on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and many terrestrial nuclear applications including nuclear energy and nuclear safety. With the progressive scaling of integrated circuit technologies and the growing complexity of electronic systems, their susceptibility to ionizing radiation has raised many exciting challenges, which are expected to drive research in the coming decade. In this book we highlight recent breakthroughs in the study of radiation effects in advanced semiconductor devices, as well as in high-performance analog, mixed signal, RF, and digital integrated circuits. We also focus on advances in embedded radiation hardening in both FPGA and microcontroller systems and apply radiation-hardened embedded systems for cryptography and image processing, targeting space applications.