GLITCH
Gamma Light Interference in Technological Circuitry and Hardware
GLITCH is a student project created by students at Luleå University of Technology. The project will create an experiment that measures the Single Event Upsets (SEU) in electronical hardware in a stratospheric Earth environment. The experiment aims to understand the rate at which these
SEUs occur with regards to factors of operating at a higher Earth latitude and during the 25th solar maximum.
The goal of the project is to design, assemble, test and fly the experiment within the BEXUS program. The project team is divided into different subteams such as electronical, software, mechanical, PR and management, all tasked with their respective parts of the project.
The end goal of the project is to answer how much of a threat to stratospheric operations the environment around Kiruna poses with regards to the increased radiation experienced during a solar cycle peak. This would in turn help future missions with information necessary to design properly protected equipment and hardware in a world where innovations like FPGAs and A.I require an increasing amount of integrated circuitry.
Payload/science
Device Under Testing (DUT):
Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) is a type of volatile memory, requiring a constant source of power to tore and maintain memory. It is constructed using a flip-flop circuit with one state representing 0 and the other representing 1. The mechanism storing the states consists of 4 transistors, as well as an additional 2 transistors for reading and writing to the memory. This is different from Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), another type of volatile memory, which requires periodic power pulses to store memory. The reason for this is because DRAM stores its bit value in a capacitor that slowly loses charge over time.
The reason why SRAM is more susceptible to SEUs than DRAM is because of the transistors. Whilst capacitors are relatively hard to influence by a small voltage, transistors can easily be influenced by a charged particle. This is becoming a growing problem since newer technology allows for smaller transistors holding smaller voltages and therefore being more affected by a small voltage passing through them, such as that of a charged particle.