I tried to read the Wikipedia article on radiation hardening electronics, but I couldn’t understand it when it tried to explain how radiation effects electronics. So explain like I’m 5, how does radiation effect electronics?
Bonus question, how does radiation hardening work?
In: Physics
Electronic, or really the ics, are built of really tiny physical structures, transistors mainly.
Radiation are tiny tiny particles that go really really fast and they pass through almost anything, except when they don’t.
When a radiation particle hits a transistor it gets destroyed.
Radiation hardening is done by shielding, e.g bigger case, or on chip level by encasing the chips in material that absorb these particles.
Or by selecting the technology that is less suceptible by radiation damage.
Redundancy, by adding more chips or chips with built in redundancy
Generally hardening is done on several levels of a device, eg special case, backup chips, purpose built ic’s etc etc
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