Raphael Steinhöfler: Radiation Evaluation of a Mixed-Signal Application-Specific Integrated Circuit

Raphael Steinhöfler from the IWF magnetometer group will be presenting his Master's thesis on radiation effects on high-precision magnetometers.
Spacecraft electronics are subject to ionizing radiation and require extensive testing during the development phase in order to ensure proper operation in space. In the course of advancing the quality of scientific magnetic field measurements in space exploration, a team at the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Electronics at Graz University of Technology has developed a new generation of the Magnetometer Front-end Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (MFA). It is a microchip based on 180 nm silicon technology that integrates all analog electronics as well as a high resolution digital-to-analog converter including a current driver, which is required for the feedback path of a miniaturized spaceborne flux-gate magnetometer.
The microchip’s response to ionizing radiation, in particular single-event effects and total ionizing dose effects, is crucial to its suitability for application in space. This thesis describes the specialized hardware that was developed with the objective of enabling the investigation of radiation-induced effects including, but not limited to, single-event Transients, Upsets and Latch-Ups. With this hardware, the microchip was exposed to a heavy ion beam at the Cyclotron Resource Center of the Université catholique de Louvain in order to characterize single-event effects as well as to an X-ray beam provided by the Institute of Electronics at Graz University of Technology to study total ionizing dose effects. Furthermore, an earlier iteration of the microchip was irradiated with a proton beam at MedAustron in Wiener Neustadt to detect possible single-event effects in an early phase of the work. The operational data recorded during the irradiation campaigns have allowed to fully characterize the microchip’s response to ionizing radiation. In particular, single-event up-sets could be classified and their respective cross-sections were calculated. Additionally, the output current characteristics of the microchip were observed over a wide range of total ionizing dose and related parameter degradation could be described. The results of this thesis clearly demonstrate that the microchip has the potential to function flawlessly in an ionizing radiation environment in space.

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