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by willis936
976 days ago
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You simply can't use digital components in high radiation environments. In borderline cases you can implement fault tolerance. This is a big topic and simple explanations with analogies does nothing besides give an inaccurate picture. The type of radiation (the particle), the speed/energy of each particle, the rate of particles passing through your surface area over time, process node size, process topology, and the details of the circuits themselves all play important roles. In many scenarios where you expect errant bit flips but minimal long term damage. Errant bit flips often put circuits in a state that has no typical entry or exit, so the device latches up and needs a power cycle. |
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I’ve had to talk to plenty of people with various levels of understanding of this, including smart hardware and FPGA types, a few radiation physics people as well, it’s not a well established “discipline” outside of some extremely small teams of engineers responsible for the sort of small batch hardened mil-spec chip fabrication runs that doesn’t really get a lot of public documentation, because while not classified, it’s extremely commercially sensitive since and the things the chips go in are usually classified to some level so there’s not a lot to work with other than some stuff that comes out of detector physics at CERN and a trickle of research papers that have come out over the years from NASA, some old DITC papers, the odd helpfully detailed SBIR grant, and some bits here and there in the occasional physics or semiconductor engineering research papers where someone gets into interesting theoretical modelling or analysis of flown hardware or something like that… it’s a niche within a niche within a niche … and the reason I know anything at all beyond being a space nerd for most of my life that was also a computer geek… is that I decided to create a startup doing space robotics, and it should be no surprise that modern robots worth the cost of putting them in space need a respectable amount of integrated circuits and all sorts of other electronics.
I think your making it seem more complicated than it really is beyond the niche nature of knowledge on the topic. It’s the typical aerospace trade triangle: sophistication vs size and weight vs cost. Except in “miniature” and having implications on software design and development. You can shield the hell out of small sensitive components but that’s going to take up size and add mass, you can get military spec parts that take up barely more room than the normal ones do but that’s going to cost a lot, you can go old school and use simpler circuit designs or larger components but this may save some money on components but increasing the size or weight which will increase the cost to get it into space…