Radiation damage and defects in NPN bipolar junction transistors irradiated by silicon ions with various energies

The characteristic of incident particle is an important factor to evaluate the correlation of radiation damage. It is useful to investigate the influence of incident particle with various energies on radiation effects of BJTs. Radiation effects in bipolar junction transistors are examined under the irradiation with 10, 24 and 40 MeV Si ions in this paper. Based on the electrical performance degradation, it is shown that the change in the reciprocal of current gain is dominated by the ionizing damage during the heavy ion irradiations at low fluence, leading to a non-linear behavior. While at a higher fluence, displacement damage is the domain effect to show a linear curve. Deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) is used to analyze the characteristic of the deep level defects induced by irradiations. DLTS results show that for the BJTs under various Si ions irradiations, the types of deep level defects induced by Si ions are similar, while the concentration of the defects is different at the same displacement dose.