Integrated Circuit Design for Radiation Environments

About the Authors

Stephen J. Gaul received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering Science from Iowa State University in 1980 and 1982, respectively. His undergraduate study focused on fields and waves, analog circuit design, and physics. His research during graduate study was supported by a grant from 3M (Minneapolis, Minnesota).

In 1983 Gaul joined Harris Semiconductor in Palm Bay, Florida. Harris Semiconductor was part of Harris Corporation, with many divisions, and Steve worked sequentially through several. These included the CMOS division as a process engineer, Bipolar division developing device simulation models, and the Custom Integrated Circuit Division working as a device engineer on a variety of programs to develop radiation hardened and other analog solutions. Several of these programs included process as well as circuit developments.

In the late 1980s, Gaul was doing research on bonded‐wafer silicon on insulator (SOI) as a replacement for dielectric isolation (DI) wafer material processing. He fabricated the first bonded wafer bipolar devices at Harris Semiconductor in 1989 and also developed bonded‐wafer material process flows and trench isolation for the first such analog components fabricated at Harris Semiconductor in the early 1990s. By the mid 1990s, Gaul had worked on a number of projects, including improving defect density in bonded/trenched material processing and solving an electro‐chemical mismatch issue on circuits using thin film resistors. ...