TCAD mixed-mode simulation of bitflip with pulsed laser

Simulation of pulsed laser single event effects (SEE) is not considered in most of the well known software packages for mixed-mode simulation of SEE. This paper shows an adaptation of the Sentaurus TCAD suite to pulsed laser SEE simulation. After the literature review, we present the virtual model of the target transistor, calibrated against a real transistor of an specific ASIC. That virtual model is used to evaluate the Linear Energy Transfer (LET) threshold for bitflip in a simulated flip-flop circuit using the heavy-ion simulation tools of TCAD. That simulations help us to make an adaptation of Sentaurus TCAD for simulation of pulsed laser experiments. The pulsed laser simulation results are compared with a laser pulse experiment, showing that the proposed model achieves more accuracy than previous models referred to in the literature.