Fraunhofer satellite radiation sensing systems: Paper presented at 69th International Astronautical Congress, Bremen, Germany, October 1-5, 2018

Fraunhofer INT develops systems for on-board radiation sensing. On-board in this context means inside electronic boxes on printed circuit boards (PCB) in close proximity to radiation sensitive electronic devices. The ability to measure dose and/or particle fluxes on the PCB is particularly of interest as this is where radiation hurts the most. In case of intense solar particle events the sudden increase of the measured particle fluxes could be used as an input for adaptive radiation mitigation techniques to protect important electronic parts and systems. Furthermore it can help to reduce radiation design margins for future missions because you get a better knowledge of the received dose inside your electronic box in a given radiation environment. In addition in the case of in-orbit verification or validation missions it is of major importance to verify the reliability of your design against the actual dose received. Our approach is to add as little devices as possible and make use of already installed hardware e.g. microprocessors to operate them, so the output of those sensor devices should already be digital. We propose to integrate additional memory devices for radiation sensing on the PCB: non-volatile UV-EPROMs to measure dose and/or SRAMs to detect high energy (solar) particles. The radiation-induced change of their digital content is a measure for the radiation exposure after calibration in a known radiation field. Fraunhofer On-board Radiation Sensors are already accepted to fly on the German geostationary Heinrich Hertz communication satellite as part of the Fraunhofer On-Board Processor and is foreseen to be implemented on-board of a NanoSat

Fraunhofer satellite radiation sensing systems

Fraunhofer INT develops systems for on-board radiation sensing. On-board in this context means inside electronic boxes on printed circuit boards (PCB) in close proximity to radiation sensitive electronic devices. The ability to measure dose and/or particle fluxes on the PCB is particularly of interest as this is where radiation hurts the most. In case of intense solar particle events the sudden increase of the measured particle fluxes could be used as an input for adaptive radiation mitigation techniques to protect important electronic parts and systems. Furthermore it can help to reduce radiation design margins for future missions because you get a better knowledge of the received dose inside your electronic box in a given radiation environment. In addition in the case of in-orbit verification or validation missions it is of major importance to verify the reliability of your design against the actual dose received. Our approach is to add as little devices as possible and make use of already installed hardware e.g. microprocessors to operate them, so the output of those sensor devices should already be digital. We propose to integrate additional memory devices for radiation sensing on the PCB: non-volatile UV-EPROMs to measure dose and/or SRAMs to detect high energy (solar) particles. The radiation-induced change of their digital content is a measure for the radiation exposure after calibration in a known radiation field. Fraunhofer On-board Radiation Sensors are already accepted to fly on the German geostationary Heinrich Hertz communication satellite as part of the Fraunhofer On-Board Processor and is foreseen to be implemented on-board of a NanoSat

Single event sensitivity and de-rating of SiC power devices to heavy ions and protons: Poster presented at 30th European Conference on Radiation and its Effects on Components and Systems, RADECS 2019, Montpellier, France, September 16-20, 2019

We present single event tests performed on silicon carbide power devices (MOSFET, JFET, Schottky diodes). The data were taken across four campaigns with heavy ions up to Krypton at the Heavy Ion Facility, UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, with Xenon ions at the G4 cave GANIL, Caen, with ultra-energetic Xenon at the H8 beamline at CERN and 45 MeV protons at the JULIC cyclotron, research centre Jülich. Throughout all tests the devices showed a high sensitivity to destructive single event induced failures even at low LETs or protons and significant derating

Proton testing of the NXP P4080 processor at the COSY accelerator: Paper presented at RADECS 2018 Data Workshop DW-7, Gothenburg, 16th - 21st September 2018

The NXP P4080 ist tested for SEE using a proton beam of up to 500 MeV. Single and multiple bit upsets of the L2/L3 cache were measured as well as core crashes with different signatures

Radiation evaluation of digital isolators for space applications

Recently we presented preliminary results on TID and SEE testing of digital isolators. In this paper, we give a comprehensive summary of radiation-hardness characterization for three digital isolator’s technologies. Further, we provide overall conclusions on their suitability for space applications and give recommendations on further investigations