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Robertson, Perry J.

Publications and source records attributed to Robertson, Perry J..

Radiation and Self Heating Effects in Hetero-Junction Bipolar Transistors (FY2019 L2 MileStone 6723 Report)

Hetero-Junction Bipolar Transistors (HBT) have several advantages over Silicon Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT) in radiation environments. One advantage is an intrinsic hardness to displacement damage causing radiation. The generally smaller size of HBTs compared to BJTs also means that less photocurrent is generated by these devices. A disadvantage of the smaller size is less ability to dissipate heat due to smaller surface areas and contacts. This report describes simulations intended to study the initial heating of HBT transistors due to ionizing radiation events and the subsequent heating caused by feedback in the devices when responding to these events.

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Authentication Without Secrets

This work examines a new approach to authentication, which is the most fundamental security primitive that underpins all cyber security protections. Current Internet authentication techniques require the protection of one or more secret keys along with the integrity protection of the algorithms/computations designed to prove possession of the secret without actually revealing it. Protecting a secret requires physical barriers or encryption with yet another secret key. The reason to strive for "Authentication without Secret Keys" is that protecting secrets (even small ones only kept in a small corner of a component or device) is much harder than protecting the integrity of information that is not secret. Promising methods are examined for authentication of components, data, programs, network transactions, and/or individuals. The successful development of authentication without secret keys will enable far more tractable system security engineering for high exposure, high consequence systems by eliminating the need for brittle protection mechanisms to protect secret keys (such as are now protected in smart cards, etc.). This paper is a re-release of SAND2009-7032 with new figures numerous edits.

Pierson, Lyndon G.↗

High Accuracy Transistor Compact Model Calibrations

Typically, transistors are modeled by the application of calibrated nominal and range models. These models consists of differing parameter values that describe the location and the upper and lower limits of a distribution of some transistor characteristic such as current capacity. Correspondingly, when using this approach, high degrees of accuracy of the transistor models are not expected since the set of models is a surrogate for a statistical description of the devices. The use of these types of models describes expected performances considering the extremes of process or transistor deviations. In contrast, circuits that have very stringent accuracy requirements require modeling techniques with higher accuracy. Since these accurate models have low error in transistor descriptions, these models can be used to describe part to part variations as well as an accurate description of a single circuit instance. Thus, models that meet these stipulations also enable the calculation of quantification of margins with respect to a functional threshold and uncertainties in these margins. Given this need, new model high accuracy calibration techniques for bipolar junction transistors have been developed and are described in this report.

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