New Insights in Radiation-Tolerant Electronics

Dear Colleagues,

The need for radiation-hardened electronics in space, avionic, and terrestrial applications has dramatically increased over the last few decades. The aggressive chip downscaling combined with the high-level radiation environments have opened new challenges for the industry and the scientific community regarding radiation effects on solid-state devices and circuits. For example, in high-energy physics experiments, unprecedented particle rates and radiation levels are foreseen, which will set demanding requirements for the readout chips and sensors in the innermost layers of the trackers. Furthermore, rad-hard ICs are important for military, communication, and national security applications as well.

When operated in radiation environments, solid-state devices and circuits may be directly struck by particles and photons, causing an alteration in their electrical response that can cause a temporary or permanent malfunction of the electronic system. Total ionizing dose (TID) degradation mechanisms, at low and ultra-high doses, have been studied in planar Si CMOS technologies and are being explored in FinFET technologies. Paths to continue the exploration include alternative semiconductor devices built in III-V materials and/or with compound semiconductors (GaN and SiC). Concerning the single-event effects (SEE), scaling of CMOS nodes has significantly increased the number of transistors influenced by the effects of a heavily ionizing particle, which requires new findings to reduce the error rate in mixed-signal ASICs but also in FPGAs. Moreover, from an economic point of view, the radiation-hardened electronics market is expected to be the fastest-growing market by 2023.

This Special Issue aims to gather high-quality papers highlighting the latest advances in radiation effects in electronic circuits and sensors and in the design of radiation-hardened analog and digital integrated circuits. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Modeling of the radiation effect in electronic devices;
• design of radiation-hard integrated circuits;
• optimization of circuits at the schematic and layout level for radiation hardening;
• radiation hardness testing;
• radiation tolerance studies of advanced devices and circuits;
• radiation hardness assurance;
• fault-tolerant integrated circuits;
• characterization of circuits and sensors at extremely high radiation doses;
• radiation effect studies in power distribution ASICs.

Dr. Gianluca Traversi
Dr. Luigi Gaioni
Dr. Stefano Bonaldo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• radiation effects
• radiation hardening
• annealing
• noise degradation effects
• total ionizing dose (TID)
• semiconductor device modeling
• neutron effects
• single event effects (SEEs)
• single event upsets (SEUs)