Wireless Passive Radiation Dosimeter Using Flash Memory

We propose and demonstrate technique to utilize commercial off-the-shelf Flash memory for radiation dosimetry application. We demonstrate that the state-of-the-art Flash chips is not only sensitive to ionizing radiation (data corruption starts at the dose of 100 rad (SiO
2
)) but also selective enough to distinguish X-ray vs Gamma-ray exposure. Sensitivity of the dosimeter is measured by correlating data corruption rate, while selectivity is achieved by utilizing dose enhancement effect and relative response from fresh vs worn-out memory blocks. Finally, an algorithm is introduced for smart phone application that can potentially be used for real-time wireless radiation dosimetry