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A consumer chip is a lot more likely to be permanently damaged by a "silver bullet" cosmic ray, though. Rad-hard chips don't just have shielding, they can also have redundant circuits and modifications to the foundry process. That said, I'm sure Ingenuity's processor is fit to purpose.


It's a bit of a shame that radiation hardened chips are stuck so far in the past.

I believe the volume is so low it does not warrant the investment to make radiation hardened versions more often.


Actually being stuck in the past might be a feature. Denser circuitry is likely to be more vulnerable to interference by ionising radiation and more vulnerable to physical damage from high energy particles.


Parts of hardening include enlarging physical features and increasing operating voltage


> A consumer chip is a lot more likely to be permanently damaged by a "silver bullet" cosmic ray, though.

How much more likely? Are the odds all that high over the mission duration?


I don't have any numbers for you, but here's a starting source: https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q11162.html

Most of my knowledge of the subject is from a friend who did his PhD dissertation on it; specifically, triply-redundant adder circuits for single-bit operations, allowing for some rad-hard chip designs using regular foundry processes.




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