NASA aims to return to Venus with heat-resistant silicon carbide chips

While Mars has been a popular destination for exploratory robots, Venus has not seen any love since 1985. The reason, of course, is that the hellish conditions on the surface of Venus make it impossible to operate landers for more than a couple of hours.

But that may change as NASA's Glenn Research Center developed a new type of computer chips that can result in the creation of landers that can survive on the surface of Venus for many months. These robots would use chips made from silicon carbide, this type of semiconductor is more difficult to work with but it can stand the high temperatures that are found on Venus.

Scientists working on the project say they're trying to recreate Moore's Law for high temperature. Chips made on this process would have very low performance compared to modern electronics, the challenge is to get as many transistors in these chips as possible. At the moment, the scientists successfully tested chips with 175 transistors in their "Venus chamber". The chips operated for 33 days in conditions similar to those found on Venus.

Pentiums these are not. A modern silicon chip can contain 7 billion transistors; each of the chips running in the Venus chamber has 175. Neudeck also uses an old-school transistor design, long since abandoned in conventional microelectronics. It's basically a hyperexpensive, obtuse pocket calculator. But a pocket calculator running on Venus could be valuable indeed. "This is already the complexity of many of the early scientific missions flown back in the '60s and '70s," Neudeck says, and more powerful than the chips on Apollo flight computers. "You really can do science."

Full details at Science Mag.