As space becomes the next domain for weapons and military threats, designers of radiation-hardened electronics are seeing more requirements for greater radiation-resistant components. In this conversation with Sean D’Arcy, Senior Director, Aerospace and Defense/IR HR at Infineon Technologies and Josh Broline, Senior Director of Marketing and Applications at Renesas, we discuss this challenge as well as the hottest applications for military space, the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, and if open architectures may be leveraged in spacecraft designs.

Today’s high-performance chips demand increasingly precise voltage tolerances on shrinking voltage rails and shockingly rapid, high-current load changes. In the satellite and space arenas, designers must also contend with the effects of TID [total ionizing dose] and SEE [single-event effects] on the output voltage accuracy of their supplies. Before choosing a power solution, designers playing in these spaces must create a regulation accuracy budget.

NASA KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The launch of the unmanned Artemis I mission, NASA’s first step in returning to the moon, is carrying a host of critical components that power the flight computers, flight-control systems, and payloads on both the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft. NASA successfully launched the Artemis I from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, November 16.

High-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are an integral part of many satellites and other systems used in space. It is important to understand how such devices respond in the harsh environment of space, where heavy ions may repeatedly strike. A detection algorithm can adequately identify single-event effects (SEE) – namely, single-event transients (SET) and single-event functional interrupts (SEFI) – in low-speed precision SAR [successive approximation register] ADCs without user-configurable registers. This information can be used to adequately determine the suitability of an ADC for space applications.

TOKYO. Renesas Electronics Corporation, supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced that its radiation-hardened (rad-hard) integrated circuits (ICs) were onboard the Hayabusa2 spacecraft that returned asteroid samples to Earth in an armored re-entry capsule on December 6, 2020. Operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Hayabusa2 launched onboard the H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center on December 3, 2014.