Exploring Radiation-Induced Vulnerabilities in RFICs Through Traditional RF Metrics

This article describes how to analyze radiation-induced effects using traditional radio-frequency (RF) metrics in RF integrated circuits (RFICs) to be used in the implementation of software-defined radios (SDRs). The impacts of total ionizing dose (TID) and single-event effects (SEEs) on the device characteristics are shown and their consequences for an SDR are discussed. The analysis is based on the error vector magnitude (EVM), carrier frequency offset (CFO), and SEE in the device configuration. It has been applied to the AD9361 RF Agile transceiver. Experimental results are obtained using the high-energy proton beam of 200 MeV at the Paul Scherrer Institute. Two different applications are analyzed to emphasize the impact that radiation effects can have on different communication schemes: quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (64-QAM). Results show that single-event transients (SETs) on the analog circuitry of the RF transceiver or single-event upsets (SEUs) inside the configuration registers can lead to EVM degradation. In addition, TID effects lead to frequency drift of the RF carrier, generating an offset between the transmitter and receiver nodes that needs to be taken into account when selecting the recovery algorithms in the receiver.