Radiation detector

Abstract

Abstract PURPOSE:To enable the dose of radioactivity including alpha rays as its part to be detected by detecting the generating rate of soft errors due to the incident alpha rays. CONSTITUTION:When alpha particles are incident upon a cell 12 in a memory array 10 in a storage operation, the particles are absorbed in a semiconductor layer that forms the cell 12 and electron-hole pairs are created in the dielectric layer of a capacitor 16. When information in the cell 12 is destroyed and its logical state is inverted, a refresh processing is not conducted. Accordingly, the readout information of lines sequentially outputted from a line input/output circuit 18 is fed to a signal output circuit 26 via a sense amplifier 22. In the circuit 26, a signal Vc corresponding to the number of '0' signals is produced by a counter 28 and compared with a reference signal Vr in a comparing circuit. When Vc>Vr holds, the signal Vc is given to a correcting circuit 32 to output an alarm signal Sa and inform that the dose of incident alpha rays is above a prescribed value.

Inventors

• 👤 Makoto Morimoto
• 👤 誠 森本
• 👤 Jun Yokogawa
• 👤 横川　純

Bibliographic Details