The purpose of this project is to develop a method for monitoring, evaluating the status of a tumor undergoing radiation treatment and transmit the radiation dose received by the tumor in real-time to an external data acquisition unit and evaluate the treatment strategy. The target system to be designed would consist of a miniature wireless sensor module which would be implanted in the region of interest and this unit transmits the data to an external receiver wirelessly.
The Modern fabrication process allows us to fabricate CMOS circuits in nanometer range which is highly desirable when used in radiation sensing scheme where size is the main constraint. The heart of the sensing system is a MOS transistor device. The electrical properties of the MOS device (drain to source resistance, threshold voltage) change when exposed to gamma radiation. The objective of this project is to evaluate the MOS transistor parameters change with radiation dose, study the effects with varying transistor widths, lengths and propose the ideal characteristics of the CMOS device. The scheme of the radiation measurement is presented. Some of the questions that will be addressed in this report are – The effect of radiation on channel resistance during&after radiation, temperature dependency of the radiation effects. The complete characterization of the sensor is performed and the results are produced and cross checked with device physics. The characterized CMOS transistor is exposed to radiation and the radiation dosage received by the transistor is sent to a RFID receiver using radio frequency communication. The signal at the RFID receiver is filtered and the actual radiation dosage was determined from the filtered output’s duty cycle. A novel approach is used in determining the radiation measurement in this study.
Design of an In-Vivo Radiation Measurement Scheme Using a Reliable Wireless Detector - Conclusions/Future Work/References
Shivaranjan Vadlapudi, Narayana Rao Vedula
University of Minnesota- Twin cities
10. Conclusions:
The effect of radiation is studied on different MOS devices. The threshold voltage of a MOS transistor decreases with a raise in radiation dosage because of the trapped holes in oxide region. For an NMOS transistor, absolute value of Vt goes down making it to conduct easily, while for a PMOS transistor it works in the other way. We can make use of this cumulative effect by studying the behavior of an inverter. The On time of an inverter decreases with radiation dosage and while the Off time increases with it. With a lower frequency input signals, the range of difference in timing values can be increased. The sensor output signal is transmitted wirelessly using a transmitter/receiver pair. The receiver data signal is obtained and plotted using a DAQ (Data Acquisition) card and a LabVIEW program. The sampled data is filtered to remove the DC and undesired high frequency components. The On and off times for different radiation doses and signal frequencies are used calibrate and measure an unknown radiation dosage value. It is also observed that the irradiated device characteristics do not change with time.