Radiation-aware analog circuit and layout design via automated simulation environment

In today's world, there is an exciting increase in space research and applications due to new areas of interest such as space exploration and mining. Due to this interest, reliability of electronic circuits that work in the space environment has become a great concern for engineers and electronic circuit designers. In order to solve this problem, there are mainly two topics to handle, which are detecting the vulnerable areas of the circuits in the presence of radiation and radiation-hardening of circuits. In terms of the former topic, there have been some simulation applications and few commercial CAD tools. However, they are mostly standalone and hard to access. For this purpose, RadiSPICE is developed as a simple but useful tool to help engineers and designers in terms of radiation simulation. The tool is capable of running Monte Carlo simulations for permanent or temporary radiation events and creating sensitivity tables of the circuit on the circuit level. Furthermore, it is extended to simulate radiation effects including the substrate effect on the layout level. In order to show the performance of the tool, some analog and digital circuits were built and tested to observe the effects of radiation.