Contents 1. Introduction
With the development of aerospace exploration, considerations of extreme environments have been included more comprehensively into most IC designs related to aerospace engineering. The extreme environments, such as temperature, radiation, pressure, vibration, etc, will easily preclude the use of conventional terrestrial IC designs for operation, actuation and movement under ambient conditions. Although the Moon (NASA's next mandated exploration venue) is relatively close to the earth and the radiation level there is not too high, the extreme temperature conditions ( F at lunar day and. at lunar night) on the lunar surface can still invalidate conventional electronic components and systems for control, sensing, and communication. This is problematic, since the development of modular, expandable, and reconfigurable human and robotics systems for lunar missions clearly requires electronic components and integrated packaged electronics modules which can operate robustly without external thermal control. Designing robust electronic systems for over 300°C (cyclic) temperature variations has never been attempted, until now.
