They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.
Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.
The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time
That is what I remember but it sounded like its a problem like that on earth with the massive atmosphere shielding and is exponentially worse in space.
I was under the impressions cpu’s were very sensitive to radiation. If we could mine and manufacture in space I could see this maybe.
Spacecraft software engineer here:
They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.
Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.
The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time
That is what I remember but it sounded like its a problem like that on earth with the massive atmosphere shielding and is exponentially worse in space.