Active Radiation-Hardening Strategy in Bulk FinFETs

In this article, we present a new method to mitigate the effect of the charge collected by trigate FinFET devices after an ionizing particle impact. The method is based on the creation of an internal structure that generates an electrical field that drives the charge generated by the ion track out of the sensitive device terminals. This electrical field is generated with the insertion of complementary doped regions near the active region of the device. We analyze the influence of the distance of those regions to the device, their depth into the substrate and their doping concentration to determine the optimal implementation which minimizes the collected charge. The impact on the device performance in terms of leakage current, threshold voltage, maximum transconductance and subthreshold voltage swing has also been investigated. Our results show that the added structures introduce negligible effects in performance degradation and total leakage current, at the cost of a small increase in area. The simulations performed with technology computer-aided design numerical (TCAD) tools in 22nm bulk FinFET technology show that the amount of charge collected by the device terminals can be reduced up to 50% for a linear energy transfer (LET) of 60 MeV-cm2/mg.