Abstract
Electronics devices that operate in outer space and nuclear reactors require radiation-hardened transistors. However, high-energy radiation can damage the channel, gate oxide and substrate of a field-effect transistor (FET), and redesigning all vulnerable parts to make them more resistant to total ionizing dose irradiation has proved challenging. Here, we report a radiation-hardened FET that uses semiconducting carbon nanotubes as the channel material, an ion gel as the gate and polyimide as the substrate. The FETs exhibit a radiation tolerance of up to 15 Mrad at a dose rate of 66.7 rad s−1, which is notably higher than the tolerance of silicon-based transistors (1 Mrad). The devices can also be used to make complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)-like inverters with similarly high tolerances. Furthermore, we show that radiation-damaged FETs can be recovered by annealing at a moderate temperature of 100 °C for 10 min.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Program (grants 2016YFA0201901 and 2016YFB0401100) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 6188102 and 61874132).
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Z.Z. proposed and supervised the project. Z.Z., L.-M.P. and J.Z. designed the experiment. M.Z. and H.X. performed all of the device/circuit fabrication and performance characterization. M.Z. and P.S. performed the TID characterization. G.Y. and J.J. performed the TID simulation using TCAD. M.Z., H.X., Z.C., Z.Z., J.Z. and L.-M.P. analysed the data and co-wrote the manuscript. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Zhu, M., Xiao, H., Yan, G. et al. Radiation-hardened and repairable integrated circuits based on carbon nanotube transistors with ion gel gates. Nat Electron 3, 622–629 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-0465-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-0465-1
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