State-of-the-Art Flash Chips for Dosimetry Applications

In this paper we show that state-of-the-art commercial off-the-shelf Flash memory chip technology (20 nm technology node with multi-level cells) is quite sensitive to ionizing radiation. We find that the fail-bit count in these Flash chips starts to increase monotonically with gamma or X-ray dose at 100 rad(SiO ₂ ). Significantly more fail bits are observed in X-ray irradiated devices, most likely due to dose enhancement effects due to high-Z back-end-of-line materials. These results show promise for dosimetry application.