via NASA
Working with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), NASA is pioneering the development of tiny spacecraft made from a single silicon chip that could slash interstellar exploration times.
On Wednesday at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, NASA’s Dong-Il Moon will present new technology aimed at ensuring such spacecraft survive the intense radiation they’ll encounter on their journey.
If a silicon chip were used as a spacecraft, calculations suggest that it could travel at one-fifth of the speed of light and reach the nearest stars in just 20 years. That’s one hundred times faster than a conventional spacecraft can offer.
Twenty years in space is still too long for an ordinary silicon chip, because in addition to the frailties it suffers on earth, such as swings in temperature, it is bombarded by radiation of very high energy. This radiation leads to the accumulation of positively charged defects in the chip’s silicon dioxide layer, where they degrade device performance. The most serious of the impairments is an increase in the current that leaks through a transistor when it is supposed to be turned off, according to Yang-Kyu Choi, leader of the team at KAIST, where the work was done. However, there are also other issues, such as a shift in the voltage at which the transistor turns on.
Two options for addressing chip damage are to select a path through space that minimizes radiation exposure and to add shielding. But the former leads to longer missions and constrains exploration, and the latter adds weight and nullifies the advantage of using a miniaturized craft. A far better approach, argues Moon, is to let the devices suffer damage but then to add a an extra contact to the transistors, and use this contact to heal the devices with heating.
“On-chip healing has been around for many, many years,” says Jin-Woo Han, a member of the NASA team. Milestones including the revelation in the 1990s— by a team at the National Microelectronics Research Centre in Cork, Ireland— that heating could drive the recovery of radiation sensors, and far more recently, heat-induced healing of flash memory by Macronix of Taiwan. The critical addition made now, Han says, is the most comprehensive analysis on radiation damage.
This study uses KAIST’s experimental “gate-all-around” nanowire transistor. Gate-all-around nanowire transistors use nanoscale wires as the transistor channel instead of today’s fin-shaped channels. The gate, the electrode that turns on or off the flow of charge through the channel, completely surrounds the nanowire. Adding an extra contact to the gate allows you to pass current through it. That current heats the gate and the channel it surrounds, fixing any radiation-induced defects.
Nanowire transistors are ideal for space, according to KAIST, because they have a relatively high degree of immunity to cosmic rays and because they are very small, with dimensions in the tens of nanometers. “The typical size for [transistor-dimensions on] chips devoted to spacecraft applications is about 500 nanometers,” says Choi. “If you can replace 500 nanometer feature sizes with 20 nanometers feature sizes, the chip size and weight can be reduced.” Costs fall too.
The gate-all-around device may not be that well known today, but production is expected to rocket in the early 2020s, when silicon foundries will use it in place of the today’s FinFET for producing circuits featuring transistors with gate lengths smaller than 5-nm.
KAIST’s has been used to form three key building blocks for a single-chip spacecraft: a microprocessor, a DRAM memory for supporting this, and a flash memory that can serve as a hard disk.
Repairs to radiation-induced damage can be made many times, with experiments showing that flash memory can be recovered up to around 10,000 times and DRAM returned to its pristine state 1012 times. With logic devices, an even higher figure is expected. These results indicate that a lengthy interstellar space mission could take place, with the chip powered down every few years, heated internally to recover its performance, and then brought back to life.
Adding a second gate for heating is not ideal, because it modifies chip design and demands the creation of a new transistor library, which escalates production costs. To address this, those at KAIST are investigating the capability of a junctionless transistor that heats the channel during normal operation when current flows through it. Separately, at NASA researchers are developing on-chip embedded microheaters that are compatible with standard circuits.
Cutting the costs of self-healing tech is critical to the future of the program. It will help to increase the appeal of the technology, which will require many more years of investment if the launch of the first silicon-chip spacecraft is to get off the ground.
Learn more: Self-Healing Transistors for Chip-Scale Starships
Receive an email update when we add a new SILICON CHIP STARSHIPS article.
The Latest on: Silicon chip starships
via Google News
The Latest on: Silicon chip starships
- 2020: As The Hardware World Turnson March 1, 2021 at 4:01 pm
Hopefully chips like these can become early success stories that inspire other companies to finally get some RISC-V silicon in production ... their next-generation Starship vehicle which the ...
- 3D Printing Using Holograms Is Actually Printing In 3Don February 27, 2021 at 4:00 pm
It’s the year 2260 and you’re being beamed from your starship to the planet below ... a light-activated monomer. Their chip is a silicon wafer containing a grid of tunable crystals.
- Apple is investigating an issue related to 'pink squares' with the M1 Mac minion February 21, 2021 at 11:43 pm
While the performance of the Apple Silicon chip has been praised, the company is reportedly investigating an issue where "pink squares" appear when the new Mac mini is connected to a display.
- Steve Blank: When National Security Falls Between the Crackson February 17, 2021 at 2:19 pm
Originally, all of America’s computer chips were produced in Silicon Valley ... Finally, the fate of the SpaceX Starship offers an example of how government oversight agencies can stifle ...
- Astra hires longtime Apple veteran Benjamin Lyon as chief engineeron February 16, 2021 at 4:00 pm
Why Astra built a space startup and rocket factory in Silicon Valley “We did not want ... crafting unique designs for things like the system-on-a-chip that now powers everything from the iPhone ...
- NASA's Perseverance rover on course for Mars landing this week, to search for signs of past lifeon February 15, 2021 at 9:14 am
A week after two space probes from China and United Arab Emirates slipped into orbit around Mars, NASA's $2.4 billion Perseverance rover, by far the most complex and ambitious of the three, will ...
- SpaceX's 2nd Starship test flight ends with another kaboomon February 11, 2021 at 10:32 am
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX’s second full test flight of its futuristic, bullet-shaped Starship ended in another fiery crash landing Tuesday. Elon Musk’s company launched its latest ...
- A Better Bureaucracy Can Close the Gap Between Defense and Commercial Technologyon February 4, 2021 at 4:00 pm
Originally, all of America’s computer chips were produced in Silicon Valley. Today ... Finally, the fate of the SpaceX Starship offers an example of how government oversight agencies can stifle ...
- SpaceX Starship had another failed landing and Twitter had a field day with iton February 4, 2021 at 8:36 am
SpaceX crashed and burned another Starship prototype on Tuesday, and Twitter was quick to respond how they won't be booking any flights soon. Just days after reportedly being under investigation ...
via Bing News