Radiation Hardness Assurance by Redundancy in Raspberry Pi Zero W Computation Metrics via Total Ionizing Dose 60Co Testing for Spacecraft Applications

This work showed the outcome from conducting formal total ionizing dose (TID) testing with a traditional 60Co source on commercial Raspberry Pi computer boards. Two Raspberry Pi boards inside a Gammacell 220 irradiator with continuous biased operations, voltage monitoring, and live computational testing and data extraction were exposed to dose rates of 2.61 ± 0.09 mGy(Si) s-1. The results showed potential tolerance doses approaching 500 Gy(Si). Computational tests included memory, calculation capability, voltage rail output, and I/O. Memory degradation was not observed alongside voltage rail and Input/Output. Individual test result deviations for CPU performance slightly increased in likelihood throughout accumulation of dose. Particular observed weakness included the SD card with potential strengths being use of redundancy and novel spot-shielding opportunities.