Applications Of Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Simulation Techniques For Predicting Single Event Effects In Microelectronics

MRED (Monte Carlo Radiative Energy Deposition) is Vanderbilt University's Geant4 application for simulating radiation events in semiconductors. Geant4 is comprised of the best available computational physics models for the transport of radiation through matter. In addition to basic radiation transport physics contained in the Geant4 core, MRED has the capability to track energy loss in tetrahedral geometric objects, includes a cross section biasing and track weighting technique for variance reduction, and additional features relevant to semiconductor device applications. The crucial element of predicting Single Event Upset (SEU) parameters using radiation transport software is the creation of a dosimetry model that accurately approximates the net collected charge at transistor contacts as a function of deposited energy. The dosimetry technique described here is the multiple sensitive volume (MSV) model. It is shown to be a reasonable approximation of the charge collection process and its parameters can be calibrated to experimental measurements of SEU cross sections. The MSV model, within the framework of MRED, is examined for heavy ion and high-energy proton SEU measurements of a static random access memory.