A C-MOS/SOS Technology for Radiation Tolerant Devices

The complementary MOS structure advantages for space and/or military applications are well known. The important qualities of these structures are low standby power, high immunity and insensitivity to power supply voltage. More, under transient ionizing radiation the complementary structure offers a partial inherent compensation of the photo- currents at the output. The SOS (Silicon on Sapphire) technology appears as the best technology for solving this problem. A test vehicle was constructed with the C-MOS/SOS technology developed at LETI, to evaluate the level of ionizing radiation tolerance. It includes 2-P channel and 2-N channel transistors, 3 inverters, 3 ring oscillators (25 stages) and 2-4-8 divider (Fig. 1).