Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by ericbarrett on Sunday February 28, 2021 @02:20PM
(#26296209)
A consumer chip is a lot more likely to be permanently damaged by a "silver bullet" cosmic ray, though. Rad-hard chips don't just have shielding, they can also have redundant circuits and modifications to the foundry process. That said, I'm sure Ingenuity's processor is fit to purpose.
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Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by alexvoda on Sunday February 28, 2021 @04:55PM
(#26297462)
It's a bit of a shame that radiation hardened chips are stuck so far in the past.
I believe the volume is so low it does not warrant the investment to make radiation hardened versions more often.
Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by simonh on Sunday February 28, 2021 @05:37PM
(#26297770)
Actually being stuck in the past might be a feature. Denser circuitry is likely to be more vulnerable to interference by ionising radiation and more vulnerable to physical damage from high energy particles.
Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by numpad0 on Sunday February 28, 2021 @08:48PM
(#26298905)
Parts of hardening include enlarging physical features and increasing operating voltage
Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by Dylan16807 on Sunday February 28, 2021 @07:29PM
(#26298475)
> A consumer chip is a lot more likely to be permanently damaged by a "silver bullet" cosmic ray, though.
How much more likely? Are the odds all that high over the mission duration?
Re:The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly
by ericbarrett on Monday March 01, 2021 @04:08PM
(#26308428)
I don't have any numbers for you, but here's a starting source: https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q11162.html
Most of my knowledge of the subject is from a friend who did his PhD dissertation on it; specifically, triply-redundant adder circuits for single-bit operations, allowing for some rad-hard chip designs using regular foundry processes.