“The chips were made on a n-on-n+ epitaxial substrate to provide latchup control, extensive guard rings around transistors were used and hardened oxides”
> An 8085 processor that could handle 1×106 rads of radiation with only a 25% reduction in performance, and 3×106 rads with a 40% drop.
Hmm, from where did they copy-paste this mangled scientific notation?
Ah here we are, pg. 37 (46 in PDF file): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA063902.pdf
[1] yes...I know the TRS-80 had a z80, not an 8085. Close enough.
The inertial navigation system is the very crazy part, along with the nuclear fusion warhead design itself.
I seriously doubt you need to fabricate 50k CPUs for a single space probe, including backups, testing chips, etc.
Back then an interface between terrestrial computer systems and a Zeta Reticulan spacecraft required a small supercomputer on our side.
haunter•53m ago
Even more interesting that they both use the IBM POWER architecture!
0, https://www.moog.com/products/avionics/spacecraft-avionics/b...
1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500
2, https://web.archive.org/web/20190226111129/https://www.baesy...
kjs3•17m ago
Frontgrade also advertises a rad-hard RISC-V, as does Microchip (a PIC64 variant), that I know nothing about, but seems like an inevitable next step. Seems like you could grab some Xilinx rad-hard FPGA and bobs your uncle.
fred_is_fred•7m ago