Cosmic rays and uptime

FPGA..

Cheers

Look for aerospace applications tests. If there are more failures at altitude then most of them are down to cosmic ray generated events. The aircraft avionics are also susceptible to energetic particles from the solar wind (as are the passengers) especially on polar routes.

You will find evidence of cosmic rays taking things down but not proof. In astronomy it tends to create transient hot pixels in CCD images that have to be ignored but seldom affects the control electronics. The exception is when an instrument is around the South Atlantic anomaly.

The Aerospace Corporation (and probably others) run all chips intended for space applications through a radiation "wringer". They hook the chip to a test setup, on a goniometer, in the beam of a particle accelerator. Then, while running test protocols on the chip, they hit it with increasing doses of light ions at about 100 MeV, which is similar to the energy of cosmic rays. They figure out how much dose rate and total dose the chip can handle. The gomiometer allows them to hit the chip at different angles. When hitting the die straight on, they get minimum energy deposited, as they increase the angle, the energy deposited increases even though the beam remains the same, as the angle increases the apparent thickness of the die.

Jon

For this reason, pregnant flight attendants should not fly on polar routes.

The RCA CD1802 CMOS processor was used in space applications even quite recently, while it has been obsolete for decades.

Just take a look at recordings inside Fukushima or Chernobyl reactor buildings, with lots of random white pixels in the video.

It's not obsolete, maybe for commercial, but the Hi-Rel can be obtained. I don't know if its still SOS, check the Intersil website.

Cheers