Effects of proton irradiation on 60 GHz CMOS transceiver chip for multi-Gbps communication in high-energy physics experiments

This article presents the experimental results of 17 MeV proton irradiation on a 60 GHz low power, half-duplex transceiver (TRX) chip implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology. It supports short range point-to-point data rate up to 6 Gbps by employing on-off keying (OOK). To investigate the irradiation hardness for high-energy physics (HEP) applications, two TRX chips were irradiated with total ionising doses (TID) of 74 and 42 kGy and fluence of $1.4 \times 10^{14}N_{{\rm eq}}/{\rm c}{\rm m}^2$1.4×1014Neq/cm2 and $0.8 \times 10^{14}N_{{\rm eq}}/{\rm c}{\rm m}^2$0.8×1014Neq/cm2 for RX and TX modes, respectively. The chips were characterised by pre- and post-irradiation analogue voltage measurements on different circuit blocks as well as through the analysis of wireless transmission parameters like bit error rate (BER), eye diagram, jitter etc. Post-irradiation measurements have shown certain reduction in performance but both TRX chips have been found operational through over the air measurements at 5 Gbps. Moreover, very small shift in the carrier frequency was observed after the irradiation.