Abstract
The Total Ionizing Dose (TID) monitoring is nowadays a crucial task for a wide range of applications running in harsh radiation environments. In view of the High-Luminosity upgrade for the Large Hadron Collider, the monitoring of radiation levels along the CERN’s accelerator complex will become even more challenging. To this extent, a more detailed knowledge of the radiation field in the accelerator tunnel and its adjacent areas becomes necessary to design installation, relocation or shielding requirements of electronics sensitive to radiation. Aiming to improve the monitoring of the TID delivered by the mixed radiation field generated within the accelerator system, investigations on new suitable dosimeters have been carried out.With this research, two devices have been studied and characterized to be employed as dosimeter and possibly to complete the use of the silicon sensor currently employed at CERN for TID monitoring, i.e. the RADiation-sensitive Field Effect Transistor (RADFET): a commercial NMOS, and an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) named FGDOS. The devices have been selected following two opposite approaches: on the one hand, reducing the costs would allow the density of the deployed sensors to increase. As a direct consequence, a more detailed dose map would be obtained for large distributed systems like the LHC. On the other hand, the radiation monitoring can be further improved by deploying more sensitive detectors, which would allow to measure the dose where the levels are too low for the RADFET. Moreover, sensors with higher resolution would permit the characterization of the radiation field in a shorter time, which means within a lower integrated luminosity.The first approach has been accomplished by searching for alternative solutions based on COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) devices, which would significantly reduce the costs and guarantee unlimited availability on the market. For this aim, investigations on a commercial discrete NMOS transistor, which was found to be very sensitive to the radiation, has been carried out.The need for improving the resolution of TID monitoring led to investigate the FGDOS, which is an innovative silicon dosimeter with a very high sensitivity that permits to detect extremely low doses.The calibration of the NMOS and the FGDOS have been performed by exposing the dosimeters to γ-ray. Their radiation response has been characterized in terms of linearity, batch-to-batch variability, and dose rate effect. The influence of the temperature has been studied and a method to compensate the temperature effect has been developed and implemented.Being the FGDOS is a System-On-Chip with several features that make the dosimeter an extremely flexible system, the characterization of its operational modes (Active, Passive and Autonomous) have been performed. Following the first characterization, some questions arose concerning the sensitivity degradation mechanisms affecting the dosimeter. To investigate this phenomenon, radiation experiments were performed with a test chip embedding only the radiation sensitive circuit of the FGDOS. The analysis of the experiments allowed the understating of the processes responsible for the sensitivity degradation, by separating the contribution of the reading transistor and the floating gate capacitor. The results of this investigation led us to considerer new design solution and compensation methods.The suitability of the NMOS and the FGDOS for TID measurement in the mixed radiation field produced by the CERN’s accelerator complex has been verified by performing accelerated radiation tests at the Cern High energy AcceleRator Mixed field facility (CHARM). The consistency of both sensors with the RADFET measurement has been demonstrated. The high sensitivity of the FGDOS leads to a significant improvement in terms of TID measurement in mixed radiation fields with respect to the RadFET, especially for low radiation intensities.