We Finally Have a Computer That Can Survive the Surface of Venus (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 8, 2017 @08:10AM from the finding-ways dept.

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.

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Re:900 is 90 times hotter than Earth? by arth1 · 2017-02-08 08:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Except 0 is arbitrary in Farenheit... Average Earth temp is 287 kelvin, average Venus temp is 735 kelvin. So really it's only like 2.5x hotter than Earth by any objective measurement.
Only if you assume a linear scale. Given how much of the interesting stuff happens near 0 K, and how little difference there is between 10,000,000 K and 100,000,000 K, I would think it would be better if we started treating temperature as a logarithmic scale.
Or, put another way, the 448 degree difference between 287 K and 735 K is obviously a lot less significant than the 287 degree difference between 0 K and 287 K.