ABSTRACT
While space-borne heavy ions are capable of producing a range of single-event effects in all integrated circuits, special consideration is required for the class of circuits generally known as oscillators. For the purpose of this chapter, an oscillator refers to a circuit that is both autonomous and time-varying in the steady state [1]. Autonomous circuits have no forced input and generate their output entirely based on the dynamics of the internal circuitry. Time-varying circuits simply produce an output that changes as a function of the time at which it is observed. Oscillators rely on an underlying nonlinear characteristic to bound this time- varying waveform into a steady-state output. The combination of nonlinear circuit dynamics and time-varying behavior in a single circuit presents interesting challenges when attempting to characterize the single-event response of oscillators.
