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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1992

A radiation-hard, low-background multiplexer design for spacecraft imager applications

A possible multiplexer design for the focal plane for the Cassini Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) is reviewed. The instrument's requirements for the multiplexed array are summarized. The VIMS instrument has a modest radiation-hardness requirement due to the trajectory and planetary environments in which the instrument will be required to operate. The total ionizing dose hardness requirement is a few tens of kilorads. A thin-gate oxide of a few hundred angstroms thickness is to be used. Field hardness is to be achieved by guard bands or hardened dielectric isolation. The design is argued to meet the low-noise and radiation-hardness required for imaging at Saturn. The design is versatile enough to provide double-correlated and double-uncorrelated sampling, which is accomplished in the signal processing electronics outside the focal plane.

Staller, Craig↗
DOE OSTI2024

Intelligent Pixel Detectors: Towards a Radiation Hard ASIC with On-Chip Machine Learning in 28 nm CMOS

Detectors at future high energy colliders will face enormous technical challenges. Disentangling the unprecedented numbers of particles expected in each event will require highly granular silicon pixel detectors with billions of readout channels. With event rates as high as 40 MHz, these detectors will generate petabytes of data per second. To enable discovery within strict bandwidth and latency constraints, future trackers must be capable of fast, power efficient, and radiation hard data-reduction at the source. We are developing a radiation hard readout integrated circuit (ROIC) in 28nm CMOS with on-chip machine learning (ML) for future intelligent pixel detectors. We will show track parameter predictions using a neural network within a single layer of silicon and hardware tests on the first tape-outs produced with TSMC. Preliminary results indicate that reading out featurized clusters from particles above a modest momentum threshold could enable using pixel information at 40 MHz.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
NASA NTRS1984

Radiation-Hardness Data For Semiconductor Devices

Document presents data on and analysis of radiation hardness of various semiconductor devices. Data specifies total-dose radiation tolerance of devices. Volume 1 of report covers diodes, bipolar transistors, field effect transistors, silicon controlled rectifiers and optical devices. Volume 2 covers integrated circuits. Volume 3 provides detailed analysis of data in volumes 1 and 2.

Price, W. E.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Statistical Modeling for Radiation Hardness Assurance

We cover the models and statistics associated with single event effects (and total ionizing dose), why we need them, and how to use them: What models are used, what errors exist in real test data, and what the model allows us to say about the DUT will be discussed. In addition, how to use other sources of data such as historical, heritage, and similar part and how to apply experience, physics, and expert opinion to the analysis will be covered. Also included will be concepts of Bayesian statistics, data fitting, and bounding rates.

Hardness Assurance↗
NASA NTRS2021

Avionics Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) Guidelines

Based on the need to develop and adopt timely and up-to-date guidance to ensure that natural space radiation environment threats do not compromise mission success, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) was solicited to develop and publish guidance for deriving radiation hardness assurance (RHA) requirements and for evaluating avionics hardware elements with respect to total ionizing dose, total non-ionizing dose, and single event effects. This document contains the outcome of the NESC assessment.

Guidelines↗
NASA NTRS2019

Radiation Hardness Assurance: Evolving for NewSpace

During the past decade, numerous small satellites have been launched into space, with dramatically expanded dependence on advanced commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies and systems required for mission success. While the radiation effects vulnerabilities of small satellites are the same as those of their larger, traditional relatives, revised approaches are needed for risk management because of differences in technical requirements and programmatic resources. While moving to COTS components and systems may reduce direct costs and procurement lead times, it undermines many cost-reduction strategies used for conventional radiation hardness assurance (RHA). Limited resources are accompanied by a lack of radiation testing and analysis, which can pose significant risks - or worse, be neglected altogether. Small satellites have benefited from short mission durations in low Earth orbits with respect to their radiation response, but as mission objectives grow and become reliant on advanced technologies operating for longer and in harsher environments, requirements need to reflect the changing scope without hindering developers that provide new capabilities.

Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA)↗
NASA NTRS2019

Radiation Hardness Assurance: Evolving for NewSpace

During the past decade, numerous small satellites have been launched into space, with dramatically expanded dependence on advanced commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies and systems required for mission success. While the radiation effects vulnerabilities of small satellites are the same as those of their larger, traditional relatives, revised approaches are needed for risk management because of differences in technical requirements and programmatic resources. While moving to COTS components and systems may reduce direct costs and procurement lead times, it undermines many cost-reduction strategies used for conventional radiation hardness assurance (RHA). Limited resources are accompanied by a lack of radiation testing and analysis, which can pose significant risks—or worse, be neglected altogether. Small satellites have benefited from short mission durations in low Earth orbits with respect to their radiation response, but as mission objectives grow and become reliant on advanced technologies operating for longer and in harsher environments, requirements need to reflect the changing scope without hindering developers that provide new capabilities.

Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA)↗
NASA NTRS2019

Radiation Hardness Assurance: Evolving for NewSpace

During the past decade, government agencies, private companies and academic institutions, have launched hundreds of small satellites into space, with dramatically expanded dependence on advanced commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies and systems required for mission success. While the radiation effects vulnerabilities of components within small satellites are the same as those of their larger, traditional relatives, revised approaches are needed for risk management because of differences in technical requirements and programmatic resources. While moving to COTS components and systems may reduce direct costs and procurement lead times, it undermines many cost-reduction strategies used for conventional radiation hardness assurance (RHA). Limited resources are accompanied by a lack of radiation testing and analysis, which can pose significant risks. Small satellites have benefited from short mission durations in low Earth orbits with respect to their radiation response, but as mission objectives grow and become reliant on advanced technologies operating for longer and in harsher environments, requirements need to reflect the changing scope without hindering developers that provide new capabilities. In this course we suggest RHA strategies that engineers and scientists can apply to a wide range of aerospace systems, including constellations, with a focus on how to manage aggressive system scaling for smaller platforms.

Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA)↗
NASA NTRS2017

Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA): Challenges and New Considerations

Use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components and emerging technologies often require space flight missions to accept elevated risk. The Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) flow includes environment definition, hazard evaluation, requirements definition, evaluation of design, and design trades to accommodate and mitigate the risk a project or program takes. Depending on the mission profile and environment, different missions may not necessarily benefit from the same risk reduction efforts or cost reduction attempts. While this poses challenges for the radiation engineer, it also presents opportunities to tailor the RHA flow to minimize risk based on the environment or design criticality while remaining within budget. This presentation will focus on an approach to RHA amidst the present challenges, using the same RHA flow as in the past, with examples from recent radiation test results. The current challenges and the types of risk will be identified. How these risks drive requirements development and realization will be explained with examples of device results and data for single event effects (SEE) and in one case total ionizing dose (TID).

Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA); Risk Managemen↗
NASA NTRS1983

Development of a radiation-hard CMOS process

It is recommended that various techniques be investigated which appear to have the potential for improving the radiation hardness of CMOS devices for prolonged space flight mission. The three key recommended processing techniques are: (1) making the gate oxide thin. It has been shown that radiation degradation is proportional to the cube of oxide thickness so that a relatively small reduction in thickness can greatly improve radiation resistance; (2) cleanliness and contamination control; and (3) to investigate different oxide growth (low temperature dry, TCE and HCL). All three produce high quality clean oxides, which are more radiation tolerant. Technique 2 addresses the reduction of metallic contamination. Technique 3 will produce a higher quality oxide by using slow growth rate conditions, and will minimize the effects of any residual sodium contamination through the introduction of hydrogen and chlorine into the oxide during growth.

Power, W. L.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Fault tolerant, radiation hard, high performance digital signal processor

An architecture has been developed for a high-performance VLSI digital signal processor that is highly reliable, fault-tolerant, and radiation-hard. The signal processor, part of a spacecraft receiver designed to support uplink radio science experiments at the outer planets, organizes the connections between redundant arithmetic resources, register files, and memory through a shuffle exchange communication network. The configuration of the network and the state of the processor resources are all under microprogram control, which both maps the resources according to algorithmic needs and reconfigures the processing should a failure occur. In addition, the microprogram is reloadable through the uplink to accommodate changes in the science objectives throughout the course of the mission. The processor will be implemented with silicon compiler tools, and its design will be verified through silicon compilation simulation at all levels from the resources to full functionality. By blending reconfiguration with redundancy the processor implementation is fault-tolerant and reliable, and possesses the long expected lifetime needed for a spacecraft mission to the outer planets.

Holmann, Edgar↗
NASA NTRS2002

Radiation Hardness Assurance for Space Systems

The space radiation environment can lead to extremely harsh operating conditions for on-board electronic box and systems. The characteristics of the radiation environment are highly dependent on the type of mission (date, duration and orbit). Radiation accelerates the aging of the electronic parts and material and can lead to a degradation of electrical performance; it can also create transient phenomena on parts. Such damage at the part level can induce damage or functional failure at electronic box, subsystem, and system levels. A rigorous methodology is needed to ensure that the radiation environment does not compromise the functionality and performance of the electronics during the system life. This methodology is called hardness assurance. It consists of those activities undertaken to ensure that the electronic piece parts placed in the space system perform to their design specifications after exposure to the space environment. It deals with system requirements, environmental definitions, part selection, part testing, shielding and radiation tolerant design. All these elements should play together in order to produce a system tolerant to.the radiation environment. An overview of the different steps of a space system hardness assurance program is given in section 2. In order to define the mission radiation specifications and compare these requirements to radiation test data, a detailed knowledge of the space environment and the corresponding electronic device failure mechanisms is required. The presentation by J. Mazur deals with the Earth space radiation environment as well as the internal environment of a spacecraft. The presentation by J. Schwank deals with ionization effects, and the presentation by T. Weatherford deals with Single particle Event Phenomena (SEP) in semiconductor devices and microcircuits. These three presentations provide more detailed background to complement the sections 3 and 4. Part selection and categorization are discussed in section 5. Section 6 presents the organization of the hardness assurance within a project. Section 7 discusses emerging radiation hardness assurance issues.

Poivey, Christian↗
NASA NTRS2017

Radiation Hardness Study on SiC Power MOSFETs

As an emerging technology, silicon carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs are showing great potential for higher temperature/power rating, higher efficiency, and reduction in size and weight, which makes this technology ideal for high temperature, harsh environment applications such as downhole, medical, avionic, or even space applications. Radiation tolerance therefore becomes a critical aspect of the device performance in such environments. In this work, we explored radiation hardness of SiC devices to total ionizing dose (TID), neutron-induced single-event burnout (SEB), and heavy-ion induced single-event effects (SEE).

SiC↗
NASA NTRS1994

Design of high-efficiency, radiation-hard, GaInP/GaAs solar cells

In recently years, Ga(0.5)In((0.5)P/GaAs cells have drawn increased attention both because of their high efficiencies and because they are well suited for space applications. They can be grown and processed as two-junction devices with roughly twice the voltage and half the current of GaAs cells. They have low temperature coefficients, and have good potential for radiation hardness. We have previously reported the effects of electron irradiation on test cells which were not optimally designed for space. From those results we estimated that an optimally designed cell could achieve 20 percent after irradiation with 10(exp 15) cm(exp -2) 1 MeV electrons. Modeling studies predicted that slightly higher efficiencies may be achievable. Record efficiencies for EOL performance of other types of cells are significantly lower. Even the best Si and InP cells have BOL efficiencies lower than the EOL efficiency we report here. Good GaAs cells have an EOL efficiency of 16 percent. The InP/Ga(0.5)In(0.5)As two-junction, two-terminal device has a BOL efficiency as high as 22.2 percent, but radiation results for these cells were limited. In this study we use the previous modeling and irradiation results to design a set of Ga(0.5)In(0.5)P/GaAs cells that will demonstrate the importance of the design parameters and result in high-efficiency devices. We report record AMO efficiencies: a BOL efficiency of 25.7 percent for a device optimized for BOL performance and two of different designs with EOL efficiencies of 19.6 percent (at 10(exp 15) cm(exp -2) 1MeV electrons). We vary the bottom-cell base doping and the top-cell thickness to show the effects of these two important design parameters. We get an unexpected result indicating that the dopant added to the bottom-cell base also increases the degradation of the top cell.

Kurtz, Sarah R.↗
DOE OSTI2026

AI-driven neutrino diagnostics and radiation-hard beam instrumentation for next-generation neutrino experiments

The Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) at Fermilab will deliver a high-intensity, multi-megawatt neutrino beam to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), enabling precision tests of the three-neutrino paradigm, CP violation searches, neutrino mass ordering determination, and supernova neutrino studies. To accelerate DUNE’s physics reach and ensure robust beam operations, we propose an integrated AI-driven framework with real-time diagnostics and radiation-hardened instrumentation. At its core is a Real-Time Beam Integrity Monitor using a physics-informed Digital Twin. By reconstructing pion phase space from muon profiles and exploiting magnetic horn optic linearity, it enables spill-by-spill beam correction and flux stabilization. By using this approach, flux-related systematics could be reduced from 5% to 1%, potentially accelerating the discovery of CP violations by four to six years. Complementing this, a US–Japan R&D effort will deploy a LAPPD-based muon monitor in the NuMI beamline. ToF measurements can be acquired with picosecond precision using this radiation-hard system, enhancing sensitivity to horn chromatic effects. Simulations confirm strong response to these effects. ML models predict beam quality and horn current to sub-percent accuracy from muon data, enhancing anomaly detection and stability. This scalable, AI-enabled strategy improves beam fidelity, reduces systematics, and sets a new standard for high-power accelerator operations.

Ganguly, Sudeshna [Fermilab] (ORCID:00000003163482↗
DOE OSTI2024

Radiation-Hard Smart-Pixel Detector ASIC ReadOut with Digital AI in 28nm

Detectors at future high energy colliders will face enormous technical challenges. Disentangling the unprecedented numbers of particles expected in each event will require highly granular silicon pixel detectors with billions of readout channels. With event rates as high as 40 MHz, these detectors will generate petabytes of data per second. To enable discovery within strict bandwidth and latency constraints, future trackers must be capable of fast, power efficient, and radiation hard data-reduction at the source. This effort is pursuing the co-design development of high-performance readout smart pixel ASICs for a future Phase III High Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. A 1.6mm2 ASIC prototype was designed by Fermilab in CMOS 28 nm bulk process and submitted for manufacturing in February 2024. It leverages the analog front-end pixel design of a previous prototype fabricated and tested in 2023, which achieved a simulated detection level of ~400e- with 30fF input capacitance. The ROIC consists of two matrices of 16×16 smart pixels, each 25×25 μm2 in size. Each smart pixel contains a charge-sensitive preamplifier with leakage current compensation and three auto-zero comparators for a 2-bit flash-type ADC. There is digital space for the integration of our fully combinatorial AI that performs momentum classification at the bunch crossing rate. The total power consumption is ∼6μW per pixel, which corresponds to ~1mW/cm2. The ASIC incorporates programmable front-end charge injection circuitry to generate pixel cluster charges during characterization. The cluster profile will be generated to duplicate hit characteristics of various momentum (pT). We will present early results from chip testing.

Parpillon, Benjamin↗