Single event effect characterization of the mixed-signal ASIC developed for CCD camera in space use

Abstract We present the single event effect (SEE) tolerance of a mixed-signal application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed for a charge-coupled device camera onboard a future X-ray astronomical mission. We adopted proton and heavy ion beams at HIMAC/NIRS in Japan. The particles with high linear energy transfer (LET) of 57.9 MeV cm 2 / mg is used to measure the single event latch-up (SEL) tolerance, which results in a sufficiently low cross-section of σ SEL 4.2 × 10 − 11 cm 2 /(Ion×ASIC). The single event upset (SEU) tolerance is estimated with various kinds of species with wide range of energy. Taking into account that a part of the protons creates recoiled heavy ions that have higher LET than that of the incident protons, we derived the probability of SEU event as a function of LET. Then the SEE event rate in a low-earth orbit is estimated considering a simulation result of LET spectrum. SEL rate is below once per 49 years, which satisfies the required latch-up tolerance. The upper limit of the SEU rate is derived to be 1.3×10 −3  events/s. Although the SEU events cannot be distinguished from the signals of X-ray photons from astronomical objects, the derived SEU rate is below 1.3% of expected non-X-ray background rate of the detector and hence these events should not be a major component of the instrumental background.