U.S. TECH FEBRUARY 2017

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Chip-Scale Starships Continued from page 1

in just 20 years. That is 100 times faster than a conventional spacecraft can offer. For an ordinary silicon chip, 20

years in space is still too long, be- cause in addition to the frailties it suffers on earth, such as swings in temperature, the space traveler is bombarded by radiation of very high energy. This radiation leads to the accumulation of positively charged defects in the chip’s silicon dioxide layer, where they degrade device per- formance. The most serious of the impair-

ments is an increase in the current that leaks through a transistor when it is supposed to be turned off, according to Yang-Kyu Choi, leader of the team at KAIST, where the work was done. However, there are also other issues, such as a shift in the voltage at which the transistor turns on. Two options for addressing chip

damage are to select a path through space that minimizes radiation expo- sure and to add shielding. But the former leads to longer missions and constrains exploration, and the latter adds weight and nullifies the advan- tage of using a miniaturized craft. A far better approach, argues Moon, is to let the devices suffer damage but then to add a an extra contact to the transistors, and use this contact to heal the devices with heating. “On-chip healing has been

around for many, many years,” says Jin-Woo Han, a member of the NASA team. Milestones including the reve- lation in the 1990s by a team at the National Microelectronics Research Centre in Cork, Ireland, that heating could drive the recovery of radiation sensors, and far more recently, heat- induced healing of flash memory by Macronix of Taiwan. The critical ad- dition made now, Han says, is the most comprehensive analysis on ra- diation damage.

February, 2017 Self-Healing Transistors for This study uses KAIST’s exper-

imental “gate-all-around” nanowire transistor. Gate-all-around nanowire transistors use nanoscale wires as the transistor channel instead of to- day’s fin-shaped channels. The gate, the electrode that turns on or off the flow of charge through the channel, completely surrounds the nanowire. Adding an extra contact to the gate allows you to pass current through it. That current heats the gate and the channel it surrounds, repairing any radiation-induced defects. Nanowire transistors are ideal

for space, according to KAIST, be- cause they have a relatively high de- gree of immunity to cosmic rays and because they are very small, with di- mensions in the tens of nanometers. “The typical size for chips devoted to spacecraft applications is about 500 nanometers,” says Choi. “If you can replace 500 nanometer feature sizes with 20 nanometer feature sizes, the chip size and weight can be reduced.” Costs fall too. The gate-all-around device may

not be that well known today, but production is expected to rocket in the early 2020s, when silicon foundries will use it in place of the to- day’s FinFET for producing circuits that have transistors with gate lengths smaller than 5 nm. KAIST’s transistor has been

used to form three key building blocks for a single-chip spacecraft: a microprocessor, a DRAM memory for supporting this, and a flash memory that can serve as a hard disk. Repairs to radiation-induced

dam age can be made many times, with experiments showing that flash memory can be recovered up to around 10,000 times and DRAM re- turned to its pristine state 1012 times. With logic devices, an even higher figure is expected. These re- sults indicate that a lengthy inter- stellar space mission could take place, with the chip powered down every few years, heated internally to recover its performance, and then brought back to life. Web: www.spectrum.ieee.org r

Contents

Tech-Op-Ed ........................... 4 Tech Watch ........................... 10 Supply Chain ........................... 12 People.................................... 14 Business News......................... 16 Business Briefs........................ 17 Management......................... 18 EMS .................................... 20 ElectronicMfg. Prods............. 28 Production............................ 50 Partnering............................. 52 Distribution........................... 54 New Products....................... 108 High-Tech Events................... 120 Editorial Calendar.............. 120 Advertisers Index................... 122

Special Focus: Test and Measurement.............. 56

Product Preview: ATX West and APEX... .............. 74

See at APEX, Booth 2515 and at ATX West, Booth 2427

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