Single-event-induced barrier lowering in deep-submicron MOS devices and circuits

In this paper, we report a novel reliability issue, coined single-event-induced barrier lowering (SEBL), which deals with barrier lowering along the channel and the source-substrate junction during a single event high energy particle strike on MOS devices. We have comprehensively studied SEBL for different channel lengths and our results suggest that it can cause significant charge enhancement, and therefore can bring down the critical energy to low values. Thus SEBL can be a strong deterrent to further reduction of the stored charge on a node and can have serious scaling implications.