Officials of the U.S. Air Force and Defense Special Weapons Agency need advanced semiconductor materials for new generations of radiation-hardened integrated circuits. They are turning to engineers at Ibis Technology Corp. in Danvers, Mass.
Ibis engineers manufacture an integrated circuit material called Separation by Implantation of Oxygen/Silicon-on-Insulator - SIMOX-SOI for short.
This material is inherently immune to naturally occurring and weapons-produced radiation, and so is of particular interest to military officials. SIMOX-SOI enables semiconductor designers to build devices that are smaller, use less power, and have higher performance than is possible with bulk silicon.
Ibis received a $749,000 research contract from the Air Force, and a $292,000 research contract from the Defense Special Weapons Agency. Both contracts are for basic research.
"Simply put, the use of an insulating substrate technology such as SIMOX creates a smaller volume to collect charge," explains Lewis Cohn, program manager at the Defense Special Weapons Agency in Alexandria, Va. "Using an insulating substrate truncates that volume. It is manifested in the area of single event upset. The longer the proton traverses the device, the more charge it deposits. If you truncate the distance it travels, you insert less change, and are less apt to upset it." The same advantages hold true with weapons-induced dose rate upset, he says. - J.K.
For more information, contact IBIS by phone at 508-777-4247, by fax at 508-777-6570, by post at 32A Cherry Hill Drive, Danvers, Mass., 01923, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.ibis.com/.
