Total Ionizing Dose and Single Event Effects Hardness Assurance Qualification Issues for Microelectronics

The radiation effects community has developed a number of hardness assurance test guidelines to assess and assure the radiation hardness of integrated circuits for use in space and/or high-energy particle accelerator applications. These include test guidelines for total dose hardness assurance qualification and single event effects (SEE) qualification. In this work, issues associated with these hardness assurance test guidelines are discussed. For total dose qualification, the main test methodologies used in the U.S. and Europe are reviewed and differences between the guidelines are discussed. In addition, some key issues that must be considered when performing total dose hardness assurance testing are addressed. Following these discussions we review some emerging issues relevant to SEE device qualification that are not covered in present SEE test guidelines. The hardness assurance implications of these issues are addressed.