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The Challenge of Space Electronics Design and Manufacturing

There’s been a shift over the last decade. Increasingly, teams are utilising industrial-grade components in space builds. For missions lasting less than a few months, the total ionising dose (TID) from space radiation is low enough that standard industrial-grade parts might perform reliably, depending upon the application. 

As per NASA, for a CubeSat designed to operate for six months in low Earth orbit, industrial-grade components may be sufficient. If a single board fails, the mission duration is already limited, and the cost of hardening all components is not economically justifiable.

However, the same logic doesn’t hold when you’re talking about weather satellites, GPS constellations, or deep-space probes. These are multi-year missions where there’s no cheaper alternative available. 

Install a non-rated component, and it may fail in ways you’re unable to predict. When that occurs, it could compromise the entire mission. That is a catastrophic failure, and no amount of engineering on the ground can remedy it once it is thousands of kilometers away.

Hence, the true design challenge lies in selecting the right grade of components for the mission: determining whether radiation-hardened parts are essential or if industrial-grade components will suffice, and if rad-hard is required, deciding how much tolerance is needed based on the expected radiation dose. 

Increasingly, designers and manufacturers are turning to lower radiation-tolerant parts as a cost-effective middle ground, and to GaN devices, which inherently offer greater radiation resilience.

Radiation-Hardened Electronics for Space Missions

Radiation in space comes from high-energy particles such as electrons, protons, and cosmic rays. Most particles tend to pass straight through and miss everything, but when they do strike something, the energy release can be significant. While external shielding protects against direct hits, the challenge is their impact on the satellite, causing data errors, creating electrical spikes, latchups in integrated circuits, and and over time, degradation or even catastrophic failure. Gallium nitride (GaN) transistors are inherently more radiation-tolerant, but the silicon transistors within integrated circuits remain particularly vulnerable.

Two Approaches to Radiation Hardening

Radiation poses a major challenge for spacecraft electronics, and mitigating its effects requires a strategic approach. The two primary strategies focus either on building inherent resilience or on enabling system-level recovery.

  • Design and Packaging: This is the traditional route where components are built from the ground up using specialised materials, techniques, circuit layouts, and packaging that resists the effects of ionising radiation. 
  • System Recovery: Rather than making every component impervious, designs focus on tolerating, detecting, and recovering from radiation effects that inevitably slip through. This tends to include ECC memory, watchdog timers, and repeated diagnostics. 

Both approaches are valid, and most major space systems use a mix.

Understanding Latch-Up in Spacecraft Electronics

One of the more serious challenges is latch-up, which occurs when a high-energy particle induces a fault in a semiconductor. This can draw uncontrolled current, causing component failure. It is not merely a transient glitch, as it constitutes a permanent failure.

Thus, mitigation relies on sound design practices, including current limiting, redundant circuits, and watchdog timers. In practice, latch-up is assumed to occur; the critical consideration is whether the system can withstand and recover from the event.

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