ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a tutorial on designing electronics for spacecraft. The term “spacecraft” includes a wide variety of applications, such as communication satellites, Earth-observing satellites, manned laboratories and space exploration vehicles, robotic observatories, planetary probes, and launch vehicles. In addition to the accelerating impact of high operating temperature on most failure mechanisms, circuits may also have to operate within performance specifications over a wider temperature range than normally seen on the ground. Circuit hardening approaches used in bipolar memory elements include current sharing hardening, dual interleaving, and the gated feedback cell. Space electronics is virtually never installed in a satellite and launched until it is “qualified,” meaning that it has been confirmed to have a high probability of meeting its operational requirements for a period exceeding its mission life.
