Computer analysis of the significance of surface boundary conditions on the collection of α-induced charge

The collection of α-particle generated charge by collectors surrounded by either uniform reflecting or uniform absorbing surfaces are compared as the two extreme cases of any real condition in IC's. The comparison for varying α-particle energies and collector sizes indicates that the differences in collected charge for the two cases is less than a factor of two if the α-particle strike is through the center of the collector. It is shown that variation of collected charge with feature length is approximately linear in both cases. The effect of scaling on soft errors in static RAM's is discussed. It is assumed that the charge transport is by diffusion only. (author)