What would be the best conditions for electronics systems?

Post Reply New Topic

I'm writing a sci-fi story and I was wondering what would be the best conditions to maintain silica computer components for extended periods of time and/or make them work at optimal functionality. I was thinking it would need to be in a dry, cold (under 0 celcius at least and in a vacuum, but I wanted the opinion of a computer expert.

You mean silicon components? They should actually just be kept at room temperature because to operate they need to have sufficient thermal energy. The power supply will also heat them quickly when turned on provided they are warm enough to function to begin with, and you don't want the to undergo an extreme temperature change or they could fracture due to thermal shock.

So a room temperature, dry environment. If this is for very very long term storage, like thousands of years, then I would keep them in a dry nitrogen atmosphere and try to remove as much moisture as I could first.

if you are talking about heavy duty electronics for power management or similar (that needs to be running) then you can use oil submerged cooling, basically the components are lowered into large vats of oil with a cooling sytem circulating the oil to provide cooling.

it is hard coming up with ideas without a little better idea of the circumstances.

I would say:
- Store and operate the semiconductors in a noble gas (Argon is the cheapest). This will prevent any oxidation. The argon should be absolutely dry.
And never operate semiconductors in a vacuum: They won't get rid of the heat; and will overheat.

- The temperature should be low, because there are always diffusion processes that degrade the pn-junctions and gradually destroy the semiconductor.The lower the temperature, the slower are the diffusion processes.
Most semicontuctors operate down to about -50 degrees Celsius.

And protection from radiation.

NASA have to use custom chips in satellites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening