Single-event effects calibration using two-photon absorption and a CMOS image sensor

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a method to get an indication of the amount of electron-hole pairs that are necessary to trigger a single-event effect (SEE) in electronics by using two-photon absorption (TPA) and a CMOS image sensor. One of the most important materials in electronics is silicon, which is also the photosensitive part of CMOS image sensors. TPA can occur in it when two photons with an energy lower than the bandgap energy interact with the same electron within a short time window. This can be done by focusing a pulsed laser beam on a sensitive node in the electronics, generating a cloud of electron-hole pairs and thus simulating a SEE. We propose to first measure the necessary laser energy to generate a SEE with TPA in the electronics, to then focus the laser beam with the same laser energy in the CMOS image sensor. With the CMOS image sensor, we will be able to tell how many electrons were detected, which gives a good indication of how many electron-hole pairs were needed for the SEE. This paper first describes TPA, then characterises different CMOS image sensors to finally compare those results with heavy-ions.