Radiation can damage electronic hardware in environments such as nuclear power plants and space exploration. Radiation hardening involves creating physical and logical shields to protect the hardware, but the process is intense and time-consuming. Testing is done in radiation chambers, but results may differ from real-life conditions.
In radioactive environments, such as those experienced with nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants, and space exploration, there is the potential for radiation to penetrate electronic hardware and release electrons that can alter the functionality of the hardware or completely destroy the chips. To combat this, radiation hardening is one way to make hardware resistant to this electronic corruption. Most chips that have been radiation resistant are similar to commercially available chips, although their design and components may be slightly different. Curing is an intense and difficult process, so these chips are normally several months or years behind the cutting edge of commercially available chips.
Electronic chips are needed in many radiation-intensive environments, including outer space and power plants. The problem with this requirement is that radiation has a tendency to release charged particles into the environment. If a single particle enters a chip, hundreds or thousands of electrons can be mixed up, causing the chip to display inaccurate information or destroying the chip completely. This makes radiation hardening essential if hardware is to be used in these environments without charged particles affecting the usefulness of the hardware.
Radiation hardening requires electronic chip manufacturers to create physical and logical shields to protect the hardware. Physically, chips are made of insulating materials and components are often magnetoresistive. The shields are also made to prevent real hardware from interacting with radiation and charged particles. Logically, the chip is designed to constantly check and scan itself for errors or memory leaks. These are both major problems in radioactive environments, so the chips place scan and scan procedures very high on their priority list.
Aside from the design and logic shields placed on the radiation-hardened chips, the chips themselves are similar to commercially available hardware that is not subject to radiation hardening. These chips are based on current chips and then modified. The change can take a long time, however, so most hardened chips are several months or years behind state-of-the-art hardware.
To test whether radiation hardening is effective, developers will typically place the hardware in a radiation chamber and subject it to proton and neutron beams similar to those you would encounter in real radioactive environments. This gives developers an idea of how effective shielding methods are. At the same time, these tests don’t completely mimic real-life conditions, meaning that test results and real-life effectiveness could be drastically different.
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