‘In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers led by Professor Joshua Yang report a new type of memory device that kept working reliably at 700 degrees Celsius. That is hotter than molten lava. Hotter than the surface of Venus, which has defeated every lander ever sent there, destroying their electronics within hours of touchdown. And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go. The device showed no signs of failing.’
rocketsocks on
This is super cool tech but it will probably require billions of investment to develop even up to a level of capability similar to chips 30+ years ago. However, it will absolutely be worth it to be able to have legitimate full on long lived landers and maybe even *rovers* on Venus plus all of the spin off benefits. There are a zillion industrial use cases where chips that operate at very high temps would be incredibly useful (for compute, sensing, communications, or signal processing), but nothing so far has been critical enough and profitable enough to justify the huge up front R&D spend. But this is precisely the area where government run research and where the huge benefits of having something like space exploration to focus on as a seed kernel for areas of research absolutely comes into play.
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‘In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers led by Professor Joshua Yang report a new type of memory device that kept working reliably at 700 degrees Celsius. That is hotter than molten lava. Hotter than the surface of Venus, which has defeated every lander ever sent there, destroying their electronics within hours of touchdown. And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go. The device showed no signs of failing.’
This is super cool tech but it will probably require billions of investment to develop even up to a level of capability similar to chips 30+ years ago. However, it will absolutely be worth it to be able to have legitimate full on long lived landers and maybe even *rovers* on Venus plus all of the spin off benefits. There are a zillion industrial use cases where chips that operate at very high temps would be incredibly useful (for compute, sensing, communications, or signal processing), but nothing so far has been critical enough and profitable enough to justify the huge up front R&D spend. But this is precisely the area where government run research and where the huge benefits of having something like space exploration to focus on as a seed kernel for areas of research absolutely comes into play.