Mechanism of synergistic effects of neutron and gamma ray radiated PNP bipolar transistors

The synergistic effects of neutron and gamma ray radiated PNP transistors are systematically investigated as functions of the neutron fluence, gamma ray dose, and dose rate. We find that the damages show a 'tick'-like dependence on the gamma ray dose after the samples are radiated by neutrons. Two negative synergistic effects are derived, both of which have similar magnitudes as the ionization damage (ID) itself. The first one depends linearly on the gamma ray dose, whose slope depends quadratically on the initial displacement damage (DD) and can be attributed to the healing of neutron-radiation-induced defects in silicon. The second one has an exponential decay with the gamma ray dose, whose amplitude shows a rather strong enhanced low-dose-rate sensitivity (ELDRS) effect and can be attributed to the passivation of neutron-induced defects near the silica/silicon interface by the gamma-ray-generated protons in silica, which can penetrate the silica/silicon interface to passivate the neutron-induced defect...