High-Temp Electronics For Venus Exploration, recent advances |
High-Temp Electronics For Venus Exploration, recent advances |
Mar 13 2013, 03:36 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 127 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 291 |
(MOD NOTE: Started a new topic for this discussion to continue. Please remember the 'no sci-fi engineering' provision of rule 1.9. Have fun!)
Also, since I'm thinking about surface operations on Venus, the state-of-the-art in high temperature electronics has advanced quite far in the past decade. Its now possible to buy off the shelf chips from vendors designed to operate at the 250-300 C range. Meanwhile basic functionality has been tested at and beyond the temperatures needed for long-term surface operations on Venus: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/SiC/ http://www.gizmag.com/extreme-silicon-carb...ctronics/16410/ http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/SiC/publicatio...Contact2010.pdf Another decade or so and a long-term Venus lander could be possible with (practically) off the shelf electronics! |
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Apr 9 2013, 11:51 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 128 Joined: 10-December 06 From: Atlanta Member No.: 1472 |
Making an IC is the difficult part. It is not clear if you have a high temperature semiconductor, it can be turned into an IC easily. I'm no expert by any mean, but my understanding is that the reason silicon ICs exist and work great is the favorable crystalline structure of Si and the existence of insulator bases that integrate well with Si (such as SiO2 and, in case of radiation hardened electronics, Al2O3=sapphire). I'm not sure if silicon carbide shares these favorable features. I guess that the earliest systems will be mainly based on discrete elements and few low density ICs.
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Apr 9 2013, 04:56 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1592 Joined: 14-October 05 From: Vermont Member No.: 530 |
I'm not sure if silicon carbide shares these favorable features. I guess that the earliest systems will be mainly based on discrete elements and few low density ICs. That sort of gets at my point-- I tend to think if you have the technology to get reliable "low density ICs" at your spec high temp, you'll very soon have enough VLSI to get a damn decent microcontroller. If it involves wafers--SiC, sapphire, whatever-- and lithography, they sort of hit the ground running these days. Technologies mature with VLSI as a given. I tend to agree that if other technologies aren't mature, the board those ICs go on might be a trip back to times when things were handmade rather than on PCBs, but again, just my opinion, is that if you have anything proven in manufacture that you can call an IC, lithography is probably going to allow you to have a microcontroller with an instruction cache and data cache. Technologies exit the lab with that level of integration. [It's my opinion that] When there is a facility that starts making qualified SiC IC's, it will have the ability to enable microcontrollers from the get-go, so it's fun but not necessary to imagine system architectures that don't need LSI. |
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