Fortifying Computer Chips for Space Travel

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Source:  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Excerpts: Berkeley Lab's particle accelerator blasts microprocessors with high-energy beams to toughen them up.  Space is cold, dark, and lonely. Deadly, too, if any one of a million things goes wrong on your spaceship. It's certainly no place for a computer chip to fail, which can happen due to the abundance of radiation bombarding a craft. Worse, ever-shrinking components on microprocessors make computers more prone to damage from high-energy radiation like protons from the sun or cosmic rays from beyond our galaxy. It's a good thing, then, that engineers know how to make a spaceship's microprocessors more robust. To start, they hit them with high-energy ions from particle accelerators here on Earth. ...One of the most long-lived and active space-chip testing programs is at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab). ...Since 1979, most American satellites have had one or more electronic components go through Berkeley Lab's cyclotron.... Chips on the Mars rover Curiosity, chips on the Solar Dynamics Observatory, chips on the space shuttles, and chips on the International Space Station have all been put through the paces in the particle accelerator before launch.  ...some electronics destined for NASA's new Mars-bound space craft called Orion are being tested at the facility.  ...What happens when radiation hits a chip? ...it leaves a destructive trail of charged particles that can cause temporary disruption or permanent damage....  ...Berkeley Lab's cyclotron splits its time between chip radiation testing (40 percent) and conducting U.S. Department of Energy nuclear physics research on superheavy elements (60 percent). The elements 110 and 114 were verified at the facility, and numerous new isotopes have been discovered over the last decade. Other Berkeley Lab accelerators, under Glenn Seaborg, were responsible for the discovery of 16 new elements on the periodic table....

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