Radiation Effects in Space Environments

Radiation environments can be hazardous to the health of ordinary commercial electronics. Not accounting for these effects can potentially lead to reduced mission performance or lifetime, especially in defense and space applications. Sandia National Laboratories has a long history of designing, building, and testing electronics for use in radiation environments. This history is based on an in-depth understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for radiation effects in electronics. Radiation Physics specializes in assessing and assuring the radiation response of electronic components in military, commercial, and space applications.

Radiation Effects on Electronics

Recently, there has been an increased emphasis on radiation effects in space due to the increasing number of satellite launches for commercial and defense applications. The natural space environment can damage electronics through total-ionizing-dose and single-event effects (SEE). These effects are caused by the naturally-occurring high energy electrons, protons, and heavy ions that are present in the space environment due to cosmic rays and the Earth's trapped radiation belts.

As technologies scale to smaller feature sizes and higher integration densities, new design and process techniques are required to mitigate the degrading effects of ionizing radiation. In addition, reduced operating voltages and low-power requirements are introducing new physics and complex failure modes for integrated circuits (ICs) operating in these radiation environments, e.g. multiple-bit upset, microdose, and microlatch. In general, it may be more difficult to achieve high levels of radiation hardness in ICs as a technologies scale into the deep sub-micron regime.