SBIR-STTR Award

Reliable on-orbit dosimetry is necessary for understanding effects of space radiation environments on spacecraft microelectronics performance and comparison of on-orbit results to ground-based testing and modeling. Understanding dosimetry at the micro-level is becoming increasingly necessary as microelectronic devices become more complex. Several innovative dosimetry approaches are under development by various groups to meet these needs. Spot shielding is commonly used to increase survivability of unhardened microelectronics in spacecraft design. The efficacy of spot shielding to reduce the TID effects has recently come into question, with spot shielded FPGA devices degrading faster than unshielded devices on an MPTB space experiment. A study is underway to understand this anomalous result and one product of the study will be a prototype space experiment board focused on testing spot shielding. Both the dosimetry issue and the spot shielding issue are critical to use of COTS microelectronics in space system design. We propose to combine the spot shielding experiment with emerging dosimetry approaches and develop hardware and software for a space experiment that provides real-time dosimetry from multiple dosimetry types. The experiment will be designed using an innovative low power experiment card with plans for integration on the Space Environment Testbed (SET) Carrier.