Radiation Hardening By Design Integrated Circuits Enabling Low-Cost Satellites for Internet-of-Things

Satellite technology serves as the key enabler to push the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) connectivity to its full potential. Unfortunately, present Integrated Circuits (ICs) for satellites are very expensive and dated. In this paper, we present an interesting investigation into the design of advanced ICs on the basis of a low-cost commercial bulk CMOS process. Subsequent to this, we further present a case study of the design of a high-reliability radiation-hardened voltage reference by means of an innovative Radiation Harden By Design (RHBD) approach.