usertests JRStern said: What quantity is needed, dozens per year? The rate of satellites being launched has increased dramatically. The 10W variant may be suitable for CubeSats. Some would be used in development kits back on Earth to test software that would run on the space-bound chips. So, hundreds at least. Reply
Gururu I'll bet the quality control standards at least are going to price these in the six-figure range. Reply
EzzyB I'll bet the quality control standards at least are going to price these in the six-figure range. Maybe so. The last time I heard of these type chips (those used on the ISS, etc), and it was only a few years ago, they were still using a 200nm process! So huge leap there, 200nm was around the turn of the century. I'm wondering if there weren't some NASA contracts and/or incentives involved as there was probably a LOT of R&D etc that went into this. The title, at least suggest that anyway. The only problem I see is that it uses DDR5. I'm not sure that even the US Government can afford that right now. :ROFLMAO: Reply
qxp EzzyB said: Maybe so. The last time I heard of these type chips (those used on the ISS, etc), and it was only a few years ago, they were still using a 200nm process! So huge leap there, 200nm was around the turn of the century. I'm wondering if there weren't some NASA contracts and/or incentives involved as there was probably a LOT of R&D etc that went into this. The title, at least suggest that anyway. One advantage of 200nm is that the transistors are physically bigger and can withstand more energy. 18A seems too tiny for anything like that, and so radiation resistance has to be done through circuit design. Would be interesting to see how they do that. Reply
TerryLaze Gururu said: I'll bet the quality control standards at least are going to price these in the six-figure range. https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/2024-intel-newsThese are probably the result ,and only part of? ,of the enclave contract and thusly probably already paid for by that contract. But yeah, if you just divide 3bil by the amount of chips that will come out of this at the end, the price will look insane. Reply
qxp TerryLaze said: https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/2024-intel-newsThese are probably the result ,and only part of? ,of the enclave contract and thusly probably already paid for by that contract. But yeah, if you just divide 3bil by the amount of chips that will come out of this at the end, the price will look insane. I am not sure this is the right interpretation. One way to look at it, is that Intel was the leading CPU manufacturer for a long time, with a lot of profits and thus a lot of taxes that went to the US government. Now that Intel got in a bit of trouble with chip performance, it makes sense to support it and a contract for something useful is certainly a good way to do that. Note how the contract says that Intel is the only domestic designer and manufacturer of chips. I think Micron is such on the memory front. Also, as they do(did ?) this contract they will produce a number of wafers, and if we assume that this amounts to only 10000 chips, you get $300k per chip. Compare this with top-end Altera FPGA ($45k) and the pricing is not that bad. https://www.mouser.com/en/ProductDetail/Altera/AGIC040R39A2E3V?qs=9vOqFld9vZXmpXcXNRUFOg%3D%3D Reply
JRStern qxp said: One advantage of 200nm is that the transistors are physically bigger and can withstand more energy. 18A seems too tiny for anything like that, and so radiation resistance has to be done through circuit design. Would be interesting to see how they do that. This is true but plain lead and/or tungsten shielding works, too. Probably some feedback to the base chip design too, circuits and rules, making it more robust. Reply
qxp JRStern said: This is true but plain lead and/or tungsten shielding works, too. Probably some feedback to the base chip design too, circuits and rules, making it more robust. Actually not that well. Lead and tungsten would work to shield from X-rays and maybe softer gamma. In space you have high-energy charged particles, in particular muons. When a muon strikes such a shield it generates a shower of lower energy charged particles which make the problem worse than if you just let the muon fly through your electronics. Here is a nice poster with a chart showing muon energy loss versus distance through the material at the sea level: https://ulab.studentorg.berkeley.edu/static/doc/posters/s183.pdf The chart shows that a muon with 1GeV of energy will lose about 60% of it after passing through 0.5 meter of lead. But 1 GeV muons are pretty common – there are plenty of muons with larger energy, but increasing rarity. See Figure 3 in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06907 Reply
JRStern qxp said: Actually not that well. Lead and tungsten would work to shield from X-rays and maybe softer gamma. In space you have high-energy charged particles, in particular muons. … Then with any luck they'll pass right through the processor, too. But I think the threat is actually minimal even so. I asked Google: "How many high energy muons pass through a cubic meter of space per second in interplanetary space between Earth and Mars?" and the answer was: "In deep interplanetary space between Earth and Mars, the number of high-energy muons passing through a cubic meter of space per second is effectively zero . While this might seem surprising since open space is full of high-energy cosmic rays, it comes down to how muons are created and how long they can survive …" Just as we don't know how to shield against neutrinos, but we also have very little reason to worry about it. We have more muons passing through our body every second than these chips will in space. Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/intel-shows-off-starfire-space-grade-chip#main
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