Degradation analysis of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics system under gamma radiation

Owing to the increasing applications of electronic systems in radiation environments such as medical radiation therapy, non-destructive testing, milling, nuclear power plant control etc., and their failures can have significant impact to the surrounding and human, their reliabilities under radiation are of crucial importance. While radiation effects on individual electronic components are well studied, the reliability of entire electronic systems in radiation environments is less understood due to the difficulty of identifying dominant failure mechanisms or failed components in a complex electronic system. This is because radiation damages on electronic components generally do not have obvious sign for identification, and desoldering every component for detailed analysis is impractical. In this work, we developed a method combining reliability statistics with the physics of failure to classify and identify failure mechanisms. Detailed failure analysis confirmed the accuracy of the method. This study focuses on a GPS tracking system for vehicles carrying radiation sources. Identifying failure modules within the system allows the determination of reliability functions of GPS with respect to each failure module, facilitating the selection of appropriate GPS systems and predicting optimal replacement times to ensure continuous vehicle monitoring. This method also allows electronic system designers to select reliable modules to assure high system reliability.