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posted by janrinok on Thursday August 06 2015, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the pack-the-sunscreen dept.

For a Venus lander mission, active cooling of most of the electronics would be necessary, but it would also need sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers that can stand up to Venus' surface conditions. Trying to keep this stuff from immediate "puddleification" isn't easy, but NASA has just thrown a quarter of a million dollars at a University of Arkansas spinoff to develop Venus-resistant chips for a weird little rover.

Thanks to some earlier National Science Foundation funding, Ozark Integrated Circuits already has a chip that can tick along quite happily at temperatures of up to 350 degrees Celsius. To bump that up to the temperatures required for Venus operation, Ozark is using a silicon carbide substrate, with a secret sauce (literally a secret, for now) for the interconnects that's something much more stable and reliable than either aluminum or copper. Besides the physical hardware, Ozark also has to come up with biasing circuits and reference models to help compensate for high temperature operation.

Does exploration of Venus suffer because it does not seem possible for life to exist there, the way it does for Mars?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:48AM (#219028)

    I run into this when replying to posts. It appears to be an issue of time. If you are an AC (not logged in and just posting as AC) you'll run out of time unless it's a short reply (or you copy & paste).

    It's almost like the inverse of the "slowdown cowboy" warning. Who knows, maybe the operator in the time check is backwards.