Effects of proton irradiation on 60 GHz CMOS transceiver chip for multi-Gbps communication in high-energy physics experiments

Abstract

This article presents the experimental results of 17 MeV proton irradiation on a 60 GHz low power, half-duplex transceiver (TRX) chip implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology. It supports short range point-to-point data rate up to 6 Gbps by employing on-off keying (OOK). To investigate the irradiation hardness for high-energy physics (HEP) applications, two TRX chips were irradiated with total ionising doses (TID) of 74 and 42 kGy and fluence of [inline-formula] and [inline-formula] for RX and TX modes, respectively. The chips were characterised by pre- and post-irradiation analogue voltage measurements on different circuit blocks as well as through the analysis of wireless transmission parameters like bit error rate (BER), eye diagram, jitter etc. Post-irradiation measurements have shown certain reduction in performance but both TRX chips have been found operational through over the air measurements at 5 Gbps. Moreover, very small shift in the carrier frequency was observed after the irradiation.

Keywords

• amplitude shift keying
• low-power electronics
• transceivers
• nuclear electronics
• silicon radiation detectors
• error statistics
• proton effects
• jitter
• CMOS integrated circuits
• position sensitive particle detectors
• radio transceivers
• CMOS technology
• proton irradiation
• CMOS transceiver chip
• short range point-to-point data rate
• half-duplex transceiver chip
• high-energy physics experiments
• multiGbps communication
• post-irradiation measurements
• post-irradiation analogue voltage measurements
• TRX chips
• high-energy physics applications