Dr. Mike Wirthlin, Dr. Jeff Goeders, and a team of ECEn students recently returned from Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico where they tested circuits they have been developing. The purpose of their study is to develop circuits that can tolerate radiation. The results of their experiments will soon be submitted for publishing.
Of the experience at Los Alamos, Dr. Wirthlin said, “we performed some experiments in their Neutron Science Center, so we used their neutron-beam to radiate some circuits that we’re developing, and we’re demonstrating improvements in reliability.” Reliability is required because terrestrial radiation can harm electronics.
“For phones, we don’t really notice it, but for electronics that drive cars, or network switches, or supercomputers, this radiation can cause problems,” he said. “We are studying fault-tolerant approaches for designing circuits, particularly FPGAs, and we do a lot of experiments to demonstrate how they work reliably.”
Their work primarily deals with supercomputers systems, networking systems, space computers, and satellites, as these can be adversely affected by radiation.
Dr. Wirthlin began conducting this study about fifteen years ago when a colleague asked him to look into it. After obtaining funding and beginning the research, he realized how much he enjoyed the work and has been doing it ever since. In fact, he looks forward to testing even more in the future. He and his team plan to visit the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, England to test the circuits there, too.
All of these experiments were made possible through SHREC (Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing.) The SHREC Center is dedicated to assisting U.S. industrial partners, government agencies, and research organizations in mission-critical computing, with research in three domains: space computing for Earth science, space science, and defense; high-performance computing for a broad range of grand-challenge apps; and resilient computing for dependability in harsh or critical environments. BYU is one of four universities in the SHREC program.