NASA Glenn beats heat with computer chips

CLEVELAND (AP) — NASA Glenn Research Center is breaking records with computer chips that can withstand intense heat, giving researchers hope that a spacecraft might even reach Venus someday.

NASA Glenn researchers have been developing chips for many years, but had a couple of breakthroughs in recent months with chips still performing after more than 2,300 hours cooking in ovens. They continue to reply to signals at 932 degrees Fahrenheit.

Such heat-resistant chips could find real-life applications in rockets, oil drills, fire sensors, cars and other as-yet-unknown things that might get faster, safer and steadier when guided by Glenn’s sturdier chips, said Philip Neudeck, who leads the research.

Now the researchers are waiting to see how long the chips last.

“Everything has a life,” Neudeck said. “You just don’t know it.”

Four tiny chips, about one to two millimeters wide and long, entered an oven on June 28. Another three entered a second oven at later dates. At last report, all seven were still responding to signals.

NASA Glenn, which is helping to design a new space vehicle dubbed Orion, has had a lot of breakthroughs recently, and last month announced a 20-year master plan to make it ready for the space challenges of the future.

The plans reflect the increased budget stability and improved job security at NASA Glenn after several years of staff cuts and budget uncertainty.

The resurgence is largely because of its work on Orion, scheduled to fly astronauts in 2015, with a moon landing slated for no later than 2020.

The chips could factor into space travel one day, maybe even making a trip to Venus — long considered too hot for a visit from Earth — a possibility, Neudeck said. The researchers plan to report the breakthroughs in a mid-October conference in Japan.

NASA Glenn’s chips are made of silicon carbide, not the plain silicon of typical computers. Silicon carbide costs several hundred times more, and tends to have more impurities. So Neudeck expects it to pay off just in particularly hot machines, such as engines for vehicles.

A computer chip is a semiconductor, which means it starts and stops conducting electricity according to signals. At high heat, silicon turns purely conductive, but silicon carbide stays semiconductive.

Chips that take the heat can lie close to the machines they guide. They don’t need long wires with fragile connections. Someday, they might connect wirelessly, Neudeck said.

The researchers are trying to book a flight in a few years for their chips to guide a test device in space. In a few more years, they hope the spaceship’s engine might rely on the chips.