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We Finally Have a Computer That Can Survive the Surface of Venus (arstechnica.com)
Planet Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. The surface temperature there is 470C (878F). This has been one of the key challenges that has prevented us from deeply exploring Venus. Normal chips can only function until around 250C, but it appears, we will soon have a computer that can withstand Venus' weather. From a report on ArsTechnica: Now, researchers out of NASA's Glenn Research Centre appear to have cracked the other big problem with high-temperature integrated circuits: they've crafted interconnects -- the tiny wires that connect transistors and other integrated components together -- that can also survive the extreme conditions on Venus. The NASA Glenn researchers combined the new interconnects with some SiC transistors to create a ceramic-packaged chip. The chip was then placed into the GEER -- the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig, a machine that can maintain Venus-like temperature and pressure for hundreds of hours at a time. The chip, a simple 3-stage oscillator, kept functioning at a steady 1.26MHz for 521 hours (21.7) days before the GEER had to be shut down.
"We Finally Have a Computer..."
"...we may soon have a computer..."
From the don't-count-your-chickens dept. ?
Maybe in the middle of winter, in Alaska. Since every year is the hottest year ever, let's assume an average global temperature of 75 degrees Farenheit. 90 times that would be 6,750 degrees F, not 878F.
Maybe if we were talking about the Kelvin scale, but even then, 90x is a pretty meaningless way of comparing temperatures. Much better to maybe mention that at 470C:
Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/period...
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
On absolute scale, Kelvin, it is closer to 2 1/2 times.
heat stroke. What else? ;)
Since supposedly men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, it's good to see they've finally created a computer that can survive women.
/ sorry, I'm not really sexist
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
90 times higher, not temperature
90 times that of earth? If they're talking temperature, on the C and F scales it's roughly 10 times, and the K scale it's like 4 times. Neither of those are anywhere near 90. Of course the article mentions atmosphere, which somehow got clipped out of the summary.
How, as an editor for a tech site, do you hire someone who can't even recognize a total goof in the summary intro? The PRESSURE at the surface of Venus is 90x that of earth.
I'd understand if you had one or two editors posting hundreds of stories a day - one might slip through. But you're barely posting one story an hour to the front page. How do you fuck that up?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Title: "We Finally Have a Computer That Can Survive the Surface of Venus"
Content: "we may soon have a computer that can withstand Venus' weather"
I don't even want to know...
So Google says the average temperature on Earth is 16 C, or 289.3 K. 90x that is about 26,000 K.
The article (yes, I looked at it) actually says the pressure is about 90 times that on Earth.
call me when you build a computer that can survive the interior of Uranus
First, a computer is a whole lot more than just a chip. How about boards, wire runs, resisters, transistors? But the atmosphere of Venus contains massive amounts of toxic gasses. If we have a computer chip that operates at high temperatures, what is it made of and how quickly does it break down inside the atmosphere of Venus?
So not only don't we have a computer that works on Venus, we don't have chips that work on Venus. TFA says that they may have a chip that operates at high temperatures but since it has not quite been invented yet we can't test the viability of said chip in Venus' atmosphere. Not only am I cynical, but I'm really tired of the chronic hyperbole in seemingly everything.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Computers finally agreeable with Venus? Interest in computers shall not be an impediment on interacting with Venus, like it used to be!
How is Venus 90x hotter than Earth?
Venus is less than 3x as hot as Earth. What a ludicrous summary. How did that pass the laugh test?
If we take the average Earth temperature to be 15 C, converting to Kelvin gives us 288.15. The average Venus temperature of 470 C becomes 743.15 k.
743.15 k / 288.15 k = 2.579
So, it would be fair to say that the surface temperature of Venus is approximately 2.5 times that of Earth.
Heat is one thing, but there's also a very acid and thick atmosphere to account for. I guess the computer needs to withstand the weight of at least 10 (random guess) libraries of congress stacked on top of it.
The statement was "the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470C (878F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water".
It's the atmospheric pressure, not the temperature, that is about 90 times that of Earth
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
it's called
1) Fluidics
2) Thermionic integrated micromodules
I bet the editors fucked up on purpose just so that we'd all start making posts about how the 90x temp is wrong. Mission accomplished.
That extreme pressure should keep them from exploding
Can't they just encase the thing in some kind of packaging with its own cooling system? Or is it a case of whatever it takes to keep it running on Venus is too fucking big to send to Venus?
The hotter something is relative to its environment the faster the heat moves away. I hope this science can be used to make mainstream desktop chips that can safely operate at much higher temperatures for quieter cooling and better performance.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
The real story here is that we have a chip composition that won't give out even under the most aggressive of overclocking profiles.
I just read that the clean-up robots at Fukushima can't withstand the radiation of the site. I wonder if this sort of improvement could be adapted to improve the clean-up hardware. Is temperature and radiation it the same kind of 'heat'?
This was an engineering joke in the 1960's, but technology has advanced to the point where we need such complex units to make sure our Mars probes actually land on Mars, although sometimes too hard.
To be clear, we don't have a computer that can survive on Venus, or anything near that. What the research team made is a ring-buffer, which is a collection of maybe 20-30 transistors arranged in a big circle (with one inverter).
That's a very far cry from even an Intel 8080, which is approximately 4500 transistors. And that's without any RAM, Flash, or anything else. This is an impressive milestone to be sure, but it's nowhere near an Arduino (let alone a full computer).
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
Have gnu, will travel.
NASA engineer: "Our grand heat-tolerant computer is reporting back the latest findings from the probe ... it confirms that all the scientific instruments are fried and not returning data."
Table-ized A.I.
The technology sounds like they they may be able to build some kind of ancient computer system to run a probe. No way it will run Linux.
Sure, they'll survive the weather, but won't they just get eaten by dinosaurs? :)
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
470C? Oh please, my AMD chip runs at least twice as hot as that. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Send it to Fukushima for robots.
With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that the greenhouse gas heated Venus is the second greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?
This is a conspiracy to waste money inventing expensive devices to explore a hot planet when it is in fact a freezing cold planet as evidenced by the huge amount of reflected solar radiation it can not be as hot as these "so called scientists" claim it is.
Just go to Fox News and find out for yourself!
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For it to be obvious, you first have to know the significance. So what makes it significant to you?
The pins coming out of a chip package get called legs sometimes, but the package is not the chip.
My 8th grade teacher Mr. Burgess said that both an apostrophe after the s and an additional 's are correct alternatives for words ending in s, and given his name he would have some incentive on being sure about this.
Yes, one possible component can survive that temperature. Memory? Resistors? Capacitors? Inductors? PCBs? Batteries? Just one more of today's overblown press releases. Be specific, not glorifying. Be scientific, for god's sake.
I've made several comments stemming from my expertise in this field. The morons who vet /. articles decided their ingnorance trumped by scientific training. I'm through with this site. It's useful time is over. I don't even care enough to log in with my "super-cool' early numerical identification. Should that matter?
Venus surface exploration is traditionally the domain of soviet russians. Unsuprisingly, their landers used alcohol (vodka) based cooling to keep hybrid An/Di electronics working for a maximum of 95-100 minutes on-site, since the booze evaporated rather quickly at such lead-melting temparatures.
In search of a long-term, fully digital solution, they began developing diamond-based semiconductors, which are theoretically operable up to 900 deg Celsius and rather tolerant of ionizing radiation. (The project was also meant for controlling advanced nuclear and space-based weaponry, not just Venus probes.)
The USSR went bankrupt and collapsed however, shortly after finding out how to make sizeable artificial diamonds for the purpose. In the Yeltsin era, a ret. USAF colonel bought the russian diamond-baking factory and transported it to California, where the machines are being used to "culture" diamonds, which are of yellowish color due to unavoidable, residual metal doping.
(The only reason Mossad didn't blow the site up is that natural yellow diamonds are very rare, very small, mostly tiny and seldom free of impurity, thus there was little market interest in them previously. The emergence of larger and purer color artificial yellow diamonds actually started a kind of snobbery, where elites are now willing to pay top dollars for a dwarf yellow gemstone that can boast of a "natural" pedigree, thus the hebrew also profit. Meanwhile the synthetic yellow gems are all laser-engraved in factory to say "cultured".)
As far as publicly known, diamond-based semiconductors haven't gotten much progress ever since. Some Silicon Valley companies are trying to grow traditional, "dishplate sized" wafers out of diamond, using vacuum or vapor based depositing, but the process takes decades to yield results.
How about one that can survive on the surface of Uranus!
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Reading the article about the Soviet experience with Venus there seemed a pretty heavy reliance on "Pyrotechnic charges"...
Soviet Project Manager: "Vere having a problem with abc operating under extreme pressure..."
Soviet Engineer "Have we blown it up yet? Ve could try blowing it up first..."
Also kinda surprised that things like pyrotechnic charges wouldn't accidentally go off under heat/pressure/corrosion.
Now make one that will survive in Uranus... atmosphere. (on spoils the joke!)
Cooler by the lake.
Venus and planetary science have a historical role in global warming. I thought I'd quote some big "skeptics" and swap out earth for venus to make a satirical point. You need not know the history to get the point.
Moderators must have taken it seriously... guess I have to make it funny or something.
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