Lineal Energy of Proton in Silicon by a Microdosimetry Simulation

Single event upset, or Single Event Effect (SEE) is increasingly important as semiconductor devices are entering into nano-meter scale. The Linear Energy Transfer (LET) concept is commonly used to estimate the rate of SEE. The SEE, however, should be related to energy deposition of each stochastic event, but not LET which is a non-stochastic quantity. Instead, microdosimetry, which uses a lineal calculation of energy lost per step for each specific track, should be used to replace LET to predict microelectronic failure from SEEs. Monte Carlo simulation is used for the demonstration, and there are several parameters needed to optimise for SEE simulation, such as the target size, physical models and scoring techniques. We also show the thickness of the sensitive volume, which also correspond to the size of a device, will change the spectra of lineal energy. With a more comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation performed in this work, we also show and explain the differences in our results and the reported results such as those from Hiemstra et al. which are commonly used in semiconductor industry for the prediction of SEE in devices.