Motor Pumps Controller: Radiation hardening

Ariane 6 Second Stage Motor Pumps Controller: Radiation hardening

Radiation Hardening is necessary for an equipment that goes into outer space since exposed to ionizing particles. Radiation can affect equipment in severe ways and these effects need to be counteracted to ensure the good functioning throughout a mission. The CMTP is part of a launcher which’s mission lasts for 2 hours which implies that it is affected by SEE. Our equipment is made radiation tolerant to SEE thanks to our agile electronics solutions.

Reliable and cost efficient solution

WATT&WELL found a way to provide a low cost and radiation tolerant equipment by using COTS components and “de risk them”. To de risk COTS components, a thorough radiation and construction analysis is done. Analysis of radiation reports of each component is performed and the probability of having an SEE on the equipment is calculated from these reports.
Several mitigation techniques at circuit level are used on our design to make the equipment radiation tolerant. The techniques include Redundancy of critical circuits, Analog filtering, Dual Path Hardening, Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR), Latching Current Limiter circuits (LCL). Mitigation techniques that are performed at a system level are Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), Majority Voting, Digital Filtering and Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR).

Upgrading architecture efficiency

The difficulty of this equipment lies in the development a radiation hardened module without using RADHARD components at a competitive price and ensure that the architecture of the circuit takes minimum space and has minimum weight.