**1. Introduction**

Modern electronics and optoelectronics are increasingly based on specific semiconductor materials other than silicon, including some elemental or compound semiconductors like germanium, silicon-germanium, and silicon carbide (group-IV) and III-V alloys [1]. These new materials are

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attracting strong interest because of their better electronic transport, optical, or high-frequency properties than Si; they can be envisaged in numerous high-performance applications (e.g., "More than Moore" microelectronics and beyond CMOS, extreme environments, high temperatures, or high-speed electronics) for which the expected device or circuit performances cannot be achieved with silicon. In such a context of growing use of new and specific semiconductors, the question of their susceptibility to natural radiation, primarily to atmospheric neutrons at ground level, is posed for high-reliability-level application domains. A special attention should be particularly paid to low-bandgap materials (Ge and most of III-V materials), envisaged as channel replacement for MOSFETs and steep switching tunnel FETs for low voltage application [2], due to their low ionization energy susceptible to amplify charge generation from sea-level neutron radiation.

**Properties (300 K) Si Ge C (diamond) 4H–SiC GaN GaAs**

Atomic number 14 32 6 14/6 31/7 31/33 Bandgap (eV) 1.124 0.661 5.47 3.23 3.39 1.424

Structure Diamond (cubic) Wurtzite (hexagonal) Zinc Blende

) 2.329 5.3267 3.515 3.21 6.10 5.32

**Table 1.** Main structural, atomic, and electronic properties of the different group-IV and III-V semiconductor materials

**Figure 1.** Differential flux of cosmic-ray induced high-energy neutrons as measured by Gordon and Goldhagen et al. using a multielement Bonner sphere spectrometer on the roof of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY [6]. *Inset*: Schematic representation of the neutron irradiation simulated using Geant4 in this work.

) 5.0 × 10<sup>22</sup> 4.42 × 10<sup>22</sup> 1.76 × 10<sup>23</sup> 5.0 × 10<sup>22</sup> 8.7 × 10<sup>22</sup> 4.5 × 10<sup>22</sup>

3.6 2.9 12 7.8 8.9 4.8

40 33 135 58 100 47

10.053

Susceptibility of Group-IV and III-V Semiconductor-Based Electronics to Atmospheric Neutrons…

3.186 5.186

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.71528

(cubic)

119

5.653

Semiconductor group IV III-V

Lattice constant (Å) 5.43 5.65 3.567 3.73

considered in the present study. (Data partially from Ref. [6]).

Density (g/cm<sup>3</sup>

Average energy (Eeh) for creation of an electronhole pair (eV)

Energy threshold (Eth) to deposit 1.8 fC (keV)

Atoms (/cm<sup>3</sup>

Following a methodology previously developed for the study of neutron-silicon interactions [3], the present work precisely examines nuclear events resulting from the interaction of atmospheric neutrons at the terrestrial level with a target layer composed of Si, Ge, SiC, C (diamond), GaAs, and GaN materials and representative of the whole sensitive volume of a typical integrated circuit. To perform this task, we constructed using the Geant4 toolkit [4, 5] a specific source of atmospheric neutrons and compiled large databases of neutron-semiconductor interaction events corresponding to tens of thousands of nuclear reactions. Details of these simulations and database compilation are given in Section 2. Section 3 presents a detailed analysis of obtained databases in terms of nuclear processes, recoil products, secondary ion production, and fragment energy distributions. Finally, Section 4 discusses the implications of these results on the rate of single-event transient effects at the device or circuit level.
