Exploring Europa Utilizing New Transistor Expertise

Researchers develop a brand new silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistor expertise to discover Europa’s excessive surroundings.

Europa, Certainly one of Jupiter’s moons, can be probably the most promising locations within the photo voltaic system to search for extraterrestrial life. Nevertheless it falls within the radiation belt of the planet. No matter that the Europa may maintain life underneath the ten kilometers thick layer of ice floor the place a liquid water ocean lies. However with floor temperatures at -180 Celsius and with excessive ranges of radiation, it’s additionally probably the most inhospitable locations within the photo voltaic system. Exploring Europa may very well be attainable within the coming years because of new purposes for silicon-germanium transistor expertise analysis at Georgia Tech.

Regents’ Professor John D. Cressler within the Faculty of Electrical and Laptop Engineering (ECE) and his college students have been working with silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs) for many years and have discovered them to have distinctive benefits in excessive environments like Europa.

The SiGe HBT introduces a nanoscale Si-Ge alloy inside a typical bipolar transistor to nano-engineer its properties, successfully producing a a lot sooner transistor whereas sustaining the economy-of-scale and low price of conventional silicon transistors. SiGe HBTs have the distinctive capability to take care of efficiency underneath excessive radiation publicity, and their properties naturally enhance at colder temperatures.

To check whether or not the brand new machine can work in Europa’s surroundings, used JPL’s Dynamitron, a machine that shoots high-flux electrons at very low temperatures to check SiGe in Europa-type environments. They uncovered SiGe HBTs to 1 million Volt electrons to a radiation dose of 5 million rads of radiation (200-400 rads is deadly to people), at 300, 200, and 115 Kelvins (-160 Celsius).

Within the subsequent two years, the GT and UT researchers will develop precise circuits from SiGe that may very well be used on Europa, comparable to radios and microcontrollers. But extra importantly, these units may then be seamlessly utilized in virtually any house surroundings, together with on the moon and Mars.