A Review of Dose Rate Dependent Effects of Total Ionizing Dose (TID) Irradiations

The literature has been reviewed in order to arrive at firm conclusions regarding total dose test procedures. The most important results are that there is little evidence for true dose rate effects for rates less than 10 rad/min. Hence a Cobalt-60 simulation of space radiation effects is completely valid if the irradiation bursts are greater than a few minutes. Further, the effects of on-going annealing in low-dose rate space environments are equivalent to that observed for irradiating and waiting the appropriate time for measurement. Hence fast measurement times following the irradiation are not necessary nor are extended low dose-rate radiation periods. Retention of bias throughput is important but need not be used when other experiments show no bias-dependent effects for a given process run.