Refined Calculation Assessment of Failure and Fault Tolerance of Sensitive Electronic Components with Actual Mass Protection
Nowadays rocket and space industry enterprises use a simplified method to evaluate failure and fault tolerance of the onboard equipment to single event effects (SEEs), when the calculation is performed for the minimum mass protection thickness (g/cm2 ) of potentially sensitive electronic components determined, as a rule, by the minimum wall thickness of the device under consideration. In this case, all structural elements of the onboard equipment, spacecraft, and neighboring devices are not included, which, in many cases, leads to a significant overestimation of the calculated SEEs frequency especially for large scale integration ICs. Neglecting the actual mass protection may require redundant measures to ensure failure and fault tolerance. The work proposes an improved approach of calculating failure and fault tolerance of sensitive electronic components and onboard equipment to the impact of heavy charged particles and high-energy protons that causes SEEs, which consists in using programs for calculating absorbed doses by the sectorization method in three-dimensional models, which makes possible to determine the minimum, maximum, and average mass protection of electronic components with the complete design of the onboard equipment and spacecraft.