Catastrophic Failures in Semiconductor Devices Exposed to Pulsed Radiation

Semiconductor devices were exposed to high intensity 1.6 MeV electron pulses. Glass diode packages and integrated circuit chips were broken. However, the failure occurring at the lowest radiation doses is lead-chip separation at the point where the lead is bonded to the chip. Statistical experiments show that the damage is caused by energy absorption in the device, and, assuming a Weibull failure distribution, give the probability of failure as P = 1 - exp[-0.00708 (¿3.15)], where P is the probability that a given gold-silicon bond will fail when exposed to dose ¿, and ¿ is the incident pulsed radiation dose in gramcalories/cm2. A technique based on absorbed doses and differential temperature rises is suggested to correlate these results with other environments. 90% confidence level failure rates and survival probabilities for many lead systems are also given.