Radiation Tolerance of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Components Deployed in an Underground Nuclear Decommissioning Embedded System

Robotics and embedded systems are increasingly used and deployed in harsh environments such as nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste handling. Development of new, low-cost, robotic solutions, requires commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to survive radioactive exposure. Understanding the response of these components to γ-radiation is important for safe and reliable deployment. Power supply regulation and microcontrollers have been highlighted as sensitive to radiation and this study determines experimentally the characteristics of degradation for COTS voltage references, voltage regulators and a microcontroller. The findings lead to development of a discrete voltage regulator constructed with individual BJTs that exhibits increased radiation tolerance.