GEDC SiGe Project Receives $9.5 million from NASA

John D. Cressler, shown here at left with students, is Byers professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and principal investigator for the SiGe research project at the Georgia Electronic Design Center.

ATLANTA (May 19, 2006) — A Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) research project to develop silicon-germanium (SiGe) mixed-signal electronic components for upcoming Lunar and Martian exploration missions has received increased funding from NASA.

The GEDC effort, "SiGe Integrated Electronics for Extreme Environments," has been approved for Phase 2 funding of $9.5 million over the next three years.

Project participants include IBM Corp., the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, BAE Systems, Boeing Corp. and Lynguent Inc., as well as five other schools - Auburn University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Maryland, the University of Tennessee and the University of Arkansas. GEDC, a mixed-signal integrated circuit research and design center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is leading the project.

"We just completed a $2.1 million Phase 1 in April and received very positive reviews from NASA," said John D. Cressler, Byers professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and principal investigator for the SiGe research project. "There is a strong possibility that one day GEDC-developed SiGe components will be working on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars."

Silicon-germanium technology takes conventional silicon integrated circuits and uses nanotechnology techniques to introduce germanium inside the silicon on an atomic scale. The resulting material has a number of advantages over conventional integrated circuit technologies for space applications. SiGe circuits have innate resistance to the high radiation levels encountered in space and also work well down to the deep cryogenic temperatures (near absolute zero) typically encountered in space.

For example, during the day the ambient temperature on the surface of the Moon is 120 degrees centigrade, while it decreases to a chilly minus-180 degrees centigrade at night. At present, conventional electronic components cannot operate over such extreme temperature ranges and must be protected from the environment, which severely constrains system architectures.

The end result of this project is that SiGe components could be used in space and planetary exploration systems without requiring protective "warm boxes" — thus providing dramatic savings in weight, bulk, power and cost while improving reliability and enabling more distributed system architectures.

"Our NASA SiGe effort is a very good example of the many successes enabled by the synergies within GEDC," said Prof. Joy Laskar, director of the center. "In-depth expertise and a collaborative environment are strong enablers of technological innovation."