Developing a Universal Mirror–mirror Laser Mapping System for Single Event Effect Research

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper the authors describe development of a system for detection of single event effects in electronic devices using two-photon absorption of femtosecond laser pulses. The paper describes mainly the technical development of the setup for imaging of the devices. The quality of the manuscript in terms of language and intelligibility is low. As an example I chose a sentence from line 49: „However, there are few of work to research how fast of mapping scanning speed and how small of mapping laser resolution.“ The main motivation, what exactly do the authors want to study with this system, is not entirely clear. It seems that they want to study the impact of high-energy particles on the functionality of electronic devices by simulating the impact of a particle using short laser pulses. However, it is not explained at all, which functions may be influenced and how this influence can be measured. Also, the technical content is not sound and some of the crucial parts are completely missing. For example I did not find any information about the quantity, which corresponds to the red color maps in the grey-shaded pictures (Figs. 3, 4, 13a+b, 16a). Does it correspond to the points, in which the electrical signal overcomes some threshold? Where is the electrical signal measured in case of complex electronic devices? Or is some optical signal measured as well? Moreover, the authors claim that the spatial resolution is 0.36 microns (line 327), but there is not a single image demonstrating that this spatial resolution is really reached. In summary, the paper requires a lot of work to make it comprehensible for readers and therefore I recommend to reject it in its present form.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents the practical laser system to generate a sensitive map of Single Event Effects with fast scanning speed and good spatial resolution. The sensitive mapping results are convincingly described for several circuit examples. So, the paper can be published after the following issues are appropriately corrected.

 

(1)In Fig. 2, it looks that the ray trajectories are not accurately drawn. What do the red and green rays mean?

 

(2)There are many grammatical flaws, as shown below.

42  which are detailed described by several researches     described in detail

 

57　SRAM cell can be achieved with step size less than 0.2 um.　　µm

 

69 More details for the laser system are described by this paper [7].   by the preceding paper

 

100 Corresponding, the waveforms generated from these four locations are shown in Figure 5.  Correspondingly

 

112  The “size per pixel” is decided by the optical setup of objective lens, and the “pixel_number” is set by operator.     determined by

 

114  After drew the ROI and set the step_size,    After the ROI is drawn and the step_size is set,

 

118  reach to the ROI.     reach the ROI.

 

122 As the dwell time is set to 100 μm    100 μs

 

126  where we can observe exact 45 pulses.   Exactly

 

130  dwell time of 100 μm    100 μs

 

170  injected angle would affect the testing, but only in a relative large spatial movement.   relatively

 

176  Cause the mirrors in BSM is a driven by voltage signal, this voltage signal could be gotten by BNC 2110 board     Because   be obtained by

 

209 Depend on the amplitude of the SET pulse, the color will change from light red to deep red.  Depending on

 

Figure 21.  1.30 um  1.90 um   µm

 

291  and discharging at node A, which leads the current dissipation is not as stable as all ‘0’ data pattern,  ?

 

304 The sensitivity distribution by TFIT simulation shows the most sensitive areas (indicated by pink & red color) locates at N1, P2 and part of A1.   are located at

 

307 First, the size of sensitive area in real mapping result is not exact same with the one    exactly the same as

 

316  however, there two factors that needs to be noted.    There are two factors that need to

 

329  Cause the testing is drawing a map within a single SRAM cell around 1 μm2, with a step size less than 0.2 μm, a slight vibration of the system would cause a false result.   Because

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript proposes sensitive mapping system based on optical "Mirror-Mirror" module to generate sensitive maps of electronic devices. The developed system is shown to be fast on millimeter scales and precise on micron scales. The authors provide explicit experimental measurements and prove that proposed mapping system is robust and reliable. 

In general, manuscript is well written. The results presented here are definitely of interest to readers of Applied Sciences journal. I can recommend the manuscript for publication.

However, I strongly advise authors to improve the graphical aspects of the manuscript, especially the following:

• figures related to the software interface (12,14) are redundant, since the software is not the main aspect of the manuscript;
• figures 7,16,18 are expected to be not simply screenshots from a software used for measurements, but rather self-consistent, nicely organized plots.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf