Atmospheric Neutron Effects on Submicron Microelectronics

Advanced microelectronic devices are becoming increasingly sensitive to upsets due to atmospheric neutrons. This mechanism has already been observed on a transcontintal airliner study. Without mitigation, this threatens military and commercial avionics,which desire to utilize the latest semiconductor technology. Currently, there is no low-cost, timely technique to evaluate and study this emerging threat. Space Micro proposes an innovative technique which utilizes very low cost high altitude balloonscoupled with a battery operated experiment platform. This offers the promise of a low cost evalution technique with the real environment (not simulated) for the latest ICs. If successful, space Micro will provide both a modular experiment package and atest service to avionics and DOD customers. This R&D enables both DOD and the commercial avionics industry to characterize and understand the threat from atmospheric neutrons in advanced geometry microelectronics. This is an impact to the $24B commercialaircraft business, which if unresolved, will cause major cost increases or worse, aircraft reliablity/safety issues.