Abstract
Radioactive pollutants are naturally present in microelectronic device materials and can be an issue for the reliability of devices. The main concern is alpha emitters that produce high-energy particles (a few MeV) that ionize the semiconductor and then trigger soft errors. The question is to know what kinds of radionuclides are present in the device, their location in the device and the abundance of each species. In this paper we describe tools that are required to address the issue of radioactive pollutants in electronic devices.