IHP tech­nol­ogy ready for space flights

With the list­ing of IHP – In­no­va­tions for High Per­for­mance Mi­cro­elec­tron­ics on the Eu­ro­pean Pre­ferred Parts List (EPPL), an im­por­tant de­vel­op­ment pe­riod at the in­sti­tute has been suc­cess­fully com­pleted. The list­ing has been car­ried out as part of an eval­u­a­tion by the Eu­ro­pean Space Agency (ESA).
The EPPL list is an im­por­tant in­stru­ment of ESA in­clud­ing all pre­ferred and suit­able com­po­nents pro­vided by Eu­ro­pean man­u­fac­tur­ers of space hard­ware and re­lated equip­ment and now con­firms the space ca­pa­bil­ity of SiGe BiC­MOS tech­nol­ogy. Here sil­i­con ger­ma­nium bipo­lar tran­sis­tors de­vel­oped at IHP are es­pe­cially ra­di­a­tion hard com­pared to stan­dard CMOS tran­sis­tors.
The eval­u­ated tech­nol­ogy SGB25RH is based on the in­dus­try proven SBG25V process and was de­vel­oped and tested to­gether with part­ner com­pa­nies over many years by sci­en­tists from IHP. The eval­u­a­tion of this ma­ture tech­nol­ogy has been car­ried out within a project funded by the Ger­man Aero­space Cen­ter (DLR) and now ap­proved by the ESA. A par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge was the de­vel­op­ment of radiation-​hard com­po­nents that with­stand the par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult en­vi­ron­ment of space. This also in­cludes the de­vel­op­ment of the mod­ules that can with­stand the so called “sin­gle event ef­fects”, which are ef­fects that can be trig­gered in semi­con­duc­tor de­vices by the in­flu­ence of par­ti­cles of ion­iz­ing ra­di­a­tion.
At the mo­ment, fur­ther tech­nolo­gies of IHP are in prepa­ra­tion for space eval­u­a­tion.

Pre­vi­ous