3 ms·

And if you are curious about the modern radiation hardened CPUs then the current state of the art ones are the MOOG BRE440 [0] and the BAE RAD5500 [1], 5545 [2]

• fred_is_fred 4mo ago
  Wow, until you posted this I thought Moog was just a synthesizer company. And a bit of an odd one at that based on how I saw that synth presented.
  • wbl 4mo ago
    Cousins. One made synths the other flight controls.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• kjs3 4mo ago
  There have been a number of rad-hard SPARC chips from different vendors tthat have flown along the way, and I know Frontgrade/Gaisler currently sells a SPARC v8 version, which isn't that far behind the 'state of the art' as the e5500 based PPCs from BEA (at least as far as state of the art in space rated, rad-hard processors goes...it's a conservative market). Quite a few rad-hard ARMs out there farther down the performance curve. 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.
• NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
  what scale of radiation do such hardened designs target?
  • haunter 4mo ago
    1 Megarad (10 Kilogray) In comparison radtherapy patients get 20 gray in 1-2 weeks so it's the 20/10000 = 0.02% of what these designs target
  • ErroneousBosh 4mo ago
    Expanding a wee bit on what the other guy said, that's typically 20Gy *one Gray at a time*. A whole body exposure of 5Gy would kill you, although it would happen over two weeks. 10kGy? Spectacularly fatal.
• pseudohadamard 4mo ago
  Current state-of-the-art rad-hard CPUs are made by AMD, Intel, and IBM, among others. Their server-grade CPUs have so much error resilience and protection in them that they would have been export-controlled rad-hard devices twenty to thirty years ago.
  • evan_a_a 4mo ago
    To my knowledge neither AMD nor Intel ship any processors that are rad hard or rad tolerant. For aerospace applications this is a very specific type of device which requires specific engineering work to achieve. You don't just get rad tolerant design through standard error correction and you definitely don't get rad hard without designing for it.
    • wahern 4mo ago
      AMD Versal XQR chips are RAD tolerant, at least according to the marketing material. See https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/versal/space-grade.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/vers... and https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/solutions/aerospace-and-defense/amd-xqr-versal-product-brief.pdf https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/solutions/a... ("The space-grade (XQR) AMD Versal adaptive SoCs continue the AMD tradition of full radiation tolerant"). These are SoCs built around ARM Cortex-A72 and -A78 cores manufactured using modern 7nm processes.
      • evan_a_a 3mo ago
        Yes, the Xilinx space grade devices are engineered and qualified for radiation tolerance. These are FPGA socs and share no heritage with AMD desktop and server processors.
    • pseudohadamard 4mo ago
      They're not advertised as such but they are. I don't have any current evals to hand but a 25-year-old paper that looked at things like the PIII concluded that "Intel processors verge on radiation-hardened devices" and another more recent one that "No apparent device degradation was apparent on any of the samples. Cumulative dose levels for exposures ranged from 1 to 17 Mrad(Si). For comparison, the ITAR level is 500 krad(Si). As noted, total dose and DR device tolerances exceed the ITAR limits for this [AMD A4-3300, 2011 vintage budget desktop CPU] off-shore fabricated design. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, AMD has not intentionally radiation hardened the device for these environments, but the technology itself supports these characteristics". IBM and Sparc CPUs are the same, tested under proton or neutron bombardment, but they don't publish dose rate figures, just FIT or MTTU.