This paper characterizes and models the effects of total ionizing dose (TID) up to 1 Grad(SiO ₂ ) on the drain leakage current of nMOSFETs fabricated with a commercial 28-nm bulk CMOS process. Experimental comparisons among individual nMOSFETs of various sizes provide insight into the TID-induced lateral parasitic devices, which contribute the most to the significant increase up to four orders of magnitude in the drain leakage current. We introduce a semiempirical physics-based approach using only three parameters to model the parallel parasitic and total drain leakage current as a function of TID. Taking into account the gate independence of the drain leakage current at high TID levels, we model the lateral parasitic device as a gateless charge-controlled device by using the simplified charge-based Enz-Krummenaker-Vittoz (EKV) MOSFET model. This approach enables us to extract the equivalent density of trapped charges related to the shallow trench isolation oxides. The adopted simplified EKV MOSFET model indicates the weak inversion operation of the lateral parasitic devices.