Design of Radiation Hardened RADFET Readout System for Space Applications

Abstract

Measurement of absorbed dose and dose rate is a common task in radiation environments such as space. This is accomplished with the specialized instruments known as radiation dosimeters. Among the most commonly used radiation dosimeters in space missions are those based on the Radiation Sensitive Field Effect Transistors (RADFETs). In this paper, we propose a design concept for a radiation hardened readout system for the real-time measurement of absorbed dose and dose rate with RADFET. The successive switching between the absorbed dose and dose rate readout modes, as well as the subsequent data processing, are performed by the self-adaptive fault-tolerant Multiprocessing System-on-Chip (MPSoC). The integrated framework controller and the real-time monitoring of particle flux with the embedded Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) enable the autonomous selection of operating and fault-tolerant modes, thus achieving the optimal performance under variable radiation conditions.