SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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?
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:15PM
The melting point isn't the important thing. (Pure Si melts at 1687 K, far above Venus ambient.)
my concern is not the resting temperature of the electronics, it's the operating temperature! if your electronics fail because of the heat they generate, that's still a failure.
NASA is already way ahead of you.
truer words were never written. ;)
Here is a list of interesting higher-temperature semiconductors which may interest you.
oww... carbon/boron (blue diamond) semiconductors look interesting (and probably pretty too!)
(Score: 1) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday August 07 2015, @02:07PM
The melting point isn't the important thing. (Pure Si melts at 1687 K, far above Venus ambient.)
my concern is not the resting temperature of the electronics, it's the operating temperature! if your electronics fail because of the heat they generate, that's still a failure.
Yes. But the electronics will fail, whether on Earth or Venus, whether from ambient heat or self-generated, when they reach a temperature too high for them to operate due to their bandgap. The melting point is irrelevant because by that point, the chips have long since stopped working.
oww... carbon/boron (blue diamond) semiconductors look interesting (and probably pretty too!)
Just wait until De Beers starts putting out ads and convinces your sysadmin you must buy one for them.