Extreme Temperature Electronics based on Self-Adaptive System using Field Programmable Gate Array

Space missions often require radiation and extreme-temperature hardened electronics to survive the harsh environments beyond earth´s atmosphere. Traditional approaches to preserve electronics incorporate radiation shielding, insulation and redundancy at the expense of power and weight. In this work, we report the implementation of a self-adaptive system using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and data converters. The self-adaptive system can autonomously recover the lost functionality of a reconfigurable analog array (RAA) integrated circuit (IC). Both the RAA IC and the self-adaptive system are operating in extreme temperatures (from 120degC down to -180degC). The RAA IC consists of reconfigurable analog blocks interconnected by several switches and programmable by bias voltages. It implements filters/amplifiers with bandwidth up to 20 MHz. The self-adaptive system controls the RAA IC and is realized on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) parts. It implements a basic compensation algorithm that corrects a RAA IC in less than a few milliseconds. Experimental results for the cold temperature environment (down to -180degC) show the change over temperature of the response of the RAA for all possible bias voltage and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.