nuclear-news

Radiation more destructive to electronics than thought, Electronics News, 3 August, 2012 RESEARCH published in the Journal of Applied Physics indicate that radiation causes at least ten times more structural damage to electronic materials than previously thought.

The study used a new characterisation method which uses a combination of lasers and acoustic waves, allowing scientists to look through solid materials and pinpoint the size and location of defect buried at the atomic level.

The method is important due to the ever-shrinking sizes of microelectronic devices. Transistors which are millions of atoms in size have a greater margin of error before they fail, but transistors which only have a few thousand atoms could fail as the result of a
single atomic defect….. The physicists found that a sample of gallium arsenide semiconductor which had been irradiated had structural damage spread over 1000 atoms due to an embedded neon atom – damage which is more extensive than previously found by other means.

August 4, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology