RadFxSat: A Flight Campaign for Recording Single-Event Effects in Commercial Off-the-Shelf Microelectronics

The RadFxSat flight campaign has four manifested CubeSats to study the effects of the space environment on different technology nodes through upset counts in SRAMs. Different orbits, technology nodes, and bias voltages can be compared. In order to count the upsets, a robust system to the radiation environment in LEO was designed using COTS parts. TID screening of parts to 30 krad(SiO
₂
), selective proton testing to test system-level SEE mitigation, and a graphical representation of the elements contributing to the radiation reliability of the system, were used to create a reliable system. For the first mission in the campaign to launch, AO-85, this design process has led to two successful years of on-orbit performance. While resets are seen on the experiment, the system is robust and recovers to continue to count upsets in the SRAMs.