A facility for the study of Single Event Effects in the TANDAR accelerator

Abstract

Semiconductor devices used in space applications suffer degradation due to the space radiation environment, which affects their electric parameters, eventually reducing the in-orbit lifetime. This relatively slow behavior is due to cumulative total dose effects. On the other hand, radiation can destroy information or even damage electronic parts of the device in a sudden way. These processes are known as Single Event Effects (SEE). Heavy ion beams from electrostatic tandem or other accelerators can be used to test and characterize the response of the electronics to SEE. Two conditions are necessary for this purpose: to use very low fluxes of only a few hundred to hundreds of thousand particles/(cm2·s), and to browse over a wide Linear Energy Transfer (LET) interval by changing the energy and/or the type of the impinging particles. In this work we describe the facility developed at the Argentine tandem accelerator (Tandar) to study SEE, and especially the fabrication and use of a perforated Ta foil to reduce the beam current to the required values. The determination of the resulting beam uniformity over the area of irradiation is also reported. The system has been tested by a SEE experiment on a webcam sensor.