Experimental Validation of an Equivalent LET Approach for Correlating Heavy-Ion and Laser-Induced Charge Deposition

Using a laser-equivalent linear energy transfer (LET) approach, strong correlation is found for collected charge following heavy-ion and pulsed-laser excitation in a bulk diode device. By significantly modifying the size of the charge distribution generated by one- and two-photon absorption compared to the depth of the sensitive region, charge deposition in a large variety of device technologies is mimicked. Nearly one-to-one correlation is found with heavy-ion charge collection, independent of the laser focusing geometry or magnitude of LET. Finally, this approach is applied to the previous studies where empirical laser-ion correlations on highly scaled technologies were proposed. These correlations are reproduced through direct calculation of the laser-equivalent LET, and outstanding observations are explained despite the sensitive areas of these devices being up to 1000 times smaller than the laser-deposited charge profile. In total, these studies suggest that this quantitative methodology for laser-ion correlation is broadly applicable for a range of complex device technologies.