It's actually not crazy on Ingenuity: vacuum really isn't an issue for most chips, the epoxy packages are totally okay from 0-1atm. The temperatures are also kept benign - One of the advantages of being in a near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere is that heat transfer is very slow. Ingenuity keeps to a fairly narrow (-20 to 60C iirc) temperature range even without substantial power spent on heaters. It gets warm during a heat-soak event after flying, and on the cold side, it doesn't get below the temps allowed for the li-ion battery. Note that it isn't designed to survive a bad martian winter, though this is mostly due to decreased power generation rather than lower temperatures.
Yes. From what I gather you wouldn't use commercial grade chips, the standard epoxy encapsulation doesn't work well at crazy temperatures and pressures. Ceramic/metal packages are preferred.
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The Mars helicopter Ingenuity also uses a commerical off the shelf snapdragon mobile processor (820 I believe).
wait do silicon based chips work in the temperature and pressure of the martian surface?
It's actually not crazy on Ingenuity: vacuum really isn't an issue for most chips, the epoxy packages are totally okay from 0-1atm. The temperatures are also kept benign - One of the advantages of being in a near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere is that heat transfer is very slow. Ingenuity keeps to a fairly narrow (-20 to 60C iirc) temperature range even without substantial power spent on heaters. It gets warm during a heat-soak event after flying, and on the cold side, it doesn't get below the temps allowed for the li-ion battery. Note that it isn't designed to survive a bad martian winter, though this is mostly due to decreased power generation rather than lower temperatures.
Yes. From what I gather you wouldn't use commercial grade chips, the standard epoxy encapsulation doesn't work well at crazy temperatures and pressures. Ceramic/metal packages are preferred.
See: https://www.ti.com/applications/industrial/aerospace-defense...