A Novel Radiation-Hardened Level Shifter With dV/dt Noise Immunity for 600-V HVIC

Abstract

This article investigates the degradation mechanism in dV/dt noise immunity robustness of traditional resistive load level shifters (LSs) under total-ionizing-dose (TID) irradiation and proposes a novel radiation-hardened nMOS-R cross-coupled (NRCC) LS with dV/dt noise immunity. When TID irradiation induces threshold voltage drift and increases the off-state leakage current in power devices, the proposed circuit employs a differential and complementary structure to counteract the degradation of electrical performance in both branches caused by the TID irradiation, thereby achieving improved radiation-hardening performance. Measurement results demonstrate that the proposed high-voltage gate drive integrated circuit (HVIC) with the novel LS level exhibits 130-V/ns noise immunity at the irradiation dose of 100 krad(Si). A normalization method is used to process measurement results for visual comparison. The degradation of dV/dt noise immunity capability of the proposed LS is improved by 26.8%, 72.4%, and 94.9% compared with the traditional LS at the irradiation dose of 30, 50, and 100 krad(Si). The HVIC is implemented using a 600-V silicon-on-insulator (SOI) BCD process.