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Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor: This receiver chip can take it

82 points by voxadam

by robviren

2 subcomments

For comparison the lifespan of a camera module was about 24-48 hours for work inside the water of the reactor near the "hot" fuel of the reactor. Fields around there were I believe on the order of 1000-5000 Rad/hr. Looked like the biggest confetti party you ever saw on the image. It was difficult for the encoder modules to keep up as well because they compressed so poorly and the reactor floors were usually hot and humid with the reactors open. I tried to make de-noising algorithms back in the day to help smooth out the noise in the reactor. Really hard to make electronics work in those places. Turns out constant bit flips and ionizing radiation is bad for hardware.

by theamk

0 subcomment

I don't have full-text access, but from the photo alone, this is far from the complete wifi solution. If you look at wifi receiver diagram [0], the photo seems to contain "mixer" and "VCO" blocks, maybe LNA and filters.. Rest of "frequency synthesizer" is possible, but less likely, as it needs much more transistors.
But what's definitely missing is "ADC" and "DSP" parts - you are not getting any usable bits out of that chip, the best you can is raw analog I and Q signals. You still need a whole bunch of complex rad-hard logic to get usable data.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Block-diagram-of-a-typic...

by amelius

0 subcomment

by deepsun

0 subcomment

I remember ITER designed internal robotic arms to not have electrical components at all, only hydraulics.

by HelloUsername

0 subcomment

0 subcomment