Designing Chips For Outer Space


If designing chips in cars sounds difficult, try designing them for space. There are huge temperature swings, and more radioactive particles than on Earth, which can cause single-event upsets, transients, functional interrupts, and latch-ups. A destructive latch-up can ruin a device, and in space that could transform an expensive piece of hardware into space junk. Ian Land, senior director for ... » read more

Designing And Securing Chips For Outer Space


Design considerations for hardware used in space go far beyond radiation hardening. These devices have to perform flawlessly for years, under extreme temperature variations, and potentially banged up by space junk or other particles floating in the void over its projected lifetime. Reliability in space adds a whole different set of design considerations. For example, while it's unlikely anyo... » read more

Radiation Tolerance Is Not Just For Rocket Scientists


As technology scales, soft errors from particle radiation are becoming increasingly concerning for in-field reliability. These radiation effects are called Single Event Upsets (SEU) and the frequency of the failures due to SEUs is known as the Soft Error Rate (SER). Soft errors are failures due to external sources. By contrast, hard errors refer to actual process manufacturing defects or electr... » read more

Effects of Size Scaling and Device Architecture on the Radiation Response of Nanoscale MOS Transistors


A new technical paper titled "Perspective on radiation effects in nanoscale metal–oxide–semiconductor devices" was published by a researcher at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. The work was partially supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Air Force Research Laboratory. According to the paper, "this Perspect... » read more

Radiation Hardening Chips For Outer Space


What’s the difference between radiation tolerant and radiation hardening, and where is each one used? Minal Sawant, director of the aerospace and defense vertical market at Xilinx, talks about different striations in the Earth’s atmosphere, how those various levels can affect radiation, and what impact that has on the functionality of increasingly dense chip circuits over extended periods o... » read more