Single Event Effects and Total Ionizing Dose Radiation Testing of NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX System on Module

Commercial satellite constellations in low earth orbit (LEO) have benefited from improved radiation performance of advanced electronics as semiconductor technologies have scaled to smaller nodes, allowing them to tap into high-performance processing on orbit with sufficient reliability for their missions. However, for United States Space Force (USSF) missions, further investigation is required to identify the suitability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) based electronics to meet more challenging radiation environments and mission reliability lifetime requirements. Radiation performance must be evaluated at the module level because some vendors only provide single-board computing (SBC) solutions. It is expected that while the integrated circuit (IC) at the heart of SBCs will have an intrinsic level of radiation tolerance, it is likely that peripheral components, such as regulators and memory, will be radiation sensitive. For this study, proton Single Event Effects (SEE) and Total Ionizing Dose (TID) radiation testing was completed on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX using a ProNova Solutions proton beam and AFRL/RV Cobalt-60 panoramic irradiator. Initial results suggest the Orin AGX system-on-module (SOM) operation is limited to 19 krad(Si). This has implications for the feasibility of operating the SOM for short-duration LEO missions