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by lizknope 2858 days ago
I've been designing semiconductors for 20 years and I thought I would learn something but this article said nothing other than he wished there were more radiation hardened devices out there.

You can learn more from wikipedia than this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening

2 comments

I have not been designing semiconductors for 20 years and I thought I would learn something...and I did!
Here’s something. Rad-hardened parts are mostly BS. An MSP430 takes 20krads without shielding. Process shrink seems to increase hardness, not decrease. I used flash FPGAs with parity circuits because flash was supposed to be better for SEU. This is all theory; it’s really hard to test SEUs. Store firmware as a low-rate RS and do circuit parity checks to trigger firmware refresh. There is probably a smarter way to do circuit ECC without the EC as a weakness, but I don’t know. That was years ago, and we were just space cowboys giving the middle finger to the rad-hard parts business.