LANL's ICE House Tests Microelectronics for Cosmic Radiation Exposure

Article from Los Alamos is about the ICE House, a facility where they test electronics by blasting them with neutrons that mimic what you’d get flying at 35,000 feet for decades. One hour of testing = 100 years of cosmic radiation.

It’s part of a larger effort to make electronics rad-hard — so that microchips don’t randomly glitch or die in flight (or in orbit). Especially relevant as chips shrink and transistor counts hit hundreds of billions (i.e. more chances for failure).

Some highlights:

Neutrons from space can flip bits or cause “latch-ups” (think: permanent short circuits).

These upsets can lead to weird bugs, BSODs, or worse — especially at altitude.

The ICE House runs ~24/7 and still can’t keep up with demand from avionics and chip companies.

They’re now planning a third beamline to expand testing capacity, and even working on proton-based testing for space use cases.

If you’re into hardware reliability, aerospace, or just cosmic-ray horror stories for computers, this is worth the read.

I wish that first graph was better; having the vertical scale (transistor count) be logarithmic would make it much easier to read.

Oh, Memories. I helped build out this target during my student gig as an undergrad.