A nano-spacecraft such as ChipSat, which consists of solar cells and functional blocks in a printed circuit board, would face a high risk of damage from radiation and aging issues on a flight into deep space. Especially, most of functional blocks such as microcontroller, memories, sensors, and communication system are semiconductor-based chips. Credit: D.-I. Moon et al.
Self healing chips—healing after radiation damage—could have an impact on interstellar spacecraft, according to reports. Scientists at NASA and KAIST) have been pioneering development of “tiny spacecraft made from a single silicon chip that could slash interstellar exploration times.” Inverse described this breakthrough as “a transistor for silicon chips that can heal itself after radiation damage.” Neel Patel in Inverse referred to ambitions “to create chip-sized spacecraft that could be shot off into space at ultra-high speeds and reach neighboring star systems within a generation’s time.”
Patel said that out of 5 interstellar probes (Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons), only Voyager 1 made it to interstellar space. Making it is not easy. Patel wrote how “deep space is riddled with intense bouts of radiation emanating from other stars and planets, as well as rapid swings in temperature.” Interestingly, in their work, an extra gate “repairs transistors through heating.” For an ordinary silicon chip, 20 years in space is too long, bombarded by radiation of very high energy. The idea involved letting the devices suffer damage but then adding an extra contact to the transistors—using this contact to heal the devices with heating.
Patel said, “the research team points to experiments that show radiation-damaged flash memory can be recovered up to 10,000 times over through heating, and DRAM can be recovered almost a trillion times. This is critical for an interstellar mission that could span for several decades.”
https://techxplore.com/news/2016-12-sustainable-nano-spacecraft-explored.html http://nobent.kaist.ac.kr/nobel/data/paper/2016/FC_DIM_sustainable%20electronics
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