Effects of Proton Irradiation on 60 GHz CMOS Transceiver Chip for Multi-Gbps Communication in High-Energy Physics Experiments

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental results of $17MeV$ proton irradiation on a $60GHz$ low power, half-duplex transceiver (TRX) chip implemented in $65nm$ CMOS technology. It supports short range point-to-point data rate up to $6Gbps$ by employing on-off keying (OOK). To investigate the irradiation hardness for high energy physics applications, two TRX chips were irradiated with total ionizing doses (TID) of $74kGy$ and $42kGy$ and fluence of $1.4\times$10${}^{14}{N}_{eq}/c{m}^2$ and $0.8\times$10${}^{14}{N}_{eq}/c{m}^2$ for RX and TX modes, respectively. The chips were characterized 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 $5Gbps$. Moreover, very small shift in the carrier frequency was observed after the irradiation.

Accepted on 25th March 2019, 6 pages