from Hacker News

Can Electronics made of COTS components work at cryogenic temperatures? (2020)

by agarttha on 5/29/21, 1:43 PM with 19 comments

• by ncmncm on 5/30/21, 7:15 PM

  Anything works at cryogenic temperatures if you heat it so it isn't.

  Thus, a big part of the Mars probes', including the Ingenuity micro-helicopter's, power budgets is keeping them warm enough overnight. The Voyager spaceprobes will be shut down soon not because they can't produce enough signal to reach Earth antenna arrays, but because they can't keep the equipment warm enough to work right.

  It would probably be possible to make stuff that would work cold, but there aren't enough places to use it to support the whole process.

• by a9h74j on 5/30/21, 3:09 PM

  The link does not resolve for me. I recall discussions and assumptions that commercial CMOS could be provisionally expected to work to cryogenic temperatures. I have only routinely qualified to -40, and many +85C parts for excursions to 105C.

• by weinzierl on 5/30/21, 1:49 PM

  As a young engineer working in aerospace I found it both surprising and remarkable that the satellites we worked with were all designed to operate at and around room temperature [1].

  I could understand that you want to avoid temperature changes as much as possible to avoid stress on the components. But why settle on an arbitrary temperature that is comfortable for humans? Of course I learnt quickly that a room temperature design makes a lot of things much easier;-)

  [1] An interesting tidbit is that in certain fields room temperature is used as a technical term to really mean a well defined temperature, and that there is a difference between North American (25 °C) and the European (20 °C) convention.

• by onelectrontech on 5/30/21, 5:22 PM

  Author here. Looks like this page got quite a bit of attention—and unfortunately our server couldn’t handle the load. I’m here to answer any questions while you wait for our website to respond!

• by agarttha on 5/31/21, 8:47 AM

  In our physics research lab we use some COTS components down to 10 mK. Many passive components no longer work and we have to use C0G capacitors and NiCr resistors. Only some discrete SiGe and HEMT transistors will continue to work. But then our thermal budget is 50 uW so design is difficult even if the components remain operational.

• by agarttha on 5/31/21, 8:40 AM

  Spacecraft can use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_... to heat up electronics.

• by the-dude on 5/30/21, 4:26 PM

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• by raziel2701 on 5/30/21, 7:16 PM

  I'm getting a 404, what does COTS mean?