Radiation Effects in GaAs Devices and ICs

This paper is a review of radiation effects in GaAs devices and IC's. It is an important area in satellite electronics because GaAs has some advantages over Si in terms of radiation hardness. The paper discusses what measurements have been made in the past on the different GaAs devices of interest, the effects of transient radiation and total dose in terms of threshold levels (where the radiation effect is first detectable) and upset levels (where the effect is so large that normal operation is prevented, e.g., in a memory cell, loss of a 1 or 0. The emphasis is on recent results in transient radiation effects.