Airbus Emergency Grounding: See How AccuTest Technology Ensures the Integrity and Reliability of Data Under Space Irradiation

Recently, Airbus SE of Europe has urgently announced that nearly 6,000 aircraft of the A320 family worldwide need to be immediately grounded for upgrades due to the discovery of severe software flaws. The trigger of the incident turned out to be an in-flight scare caused by solar radiation: an A320 suddenly nosedived while in autopilot mode, injuring several people.It was found through the investigation that the culprit behind the aircraft loss of control was solar energetic particles.These cosmic radiations penetrate the atmosphere and strike the memory chips of the ELAC—the aircraft's critical control system—triggering a bit flip phenomenon: the 0s and 1s in the data are flipped, causing the computer to send erroneous commands and the aircraft to suddenly dive downward without any manual operation.

Yes, in the vast space environment hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers away from the Earth, spacecraft are constantly subjected to the bombardment of energetic particle streams. With the continuous improvement in the electronization and intelligence levels of aerospace systems, the impact of space irradiation on aerospace safety has become increasingly prominent. Traditional chips are prone to data errors in high-radiation environments, which may cause system disorders at best and trigger out-of-control incidents that threaten safety at worst.Therefore, from near-Earth airspace to deep space, radiation-hardened technology has become the lifeline for ensuring mission reliability.

In the past few years, the global aerospace industry has witnessed explosive growth, which has also brought brand-new challenges to on-board storage technology. According to the filing plan of the International Telecommunication Union, China is expected to complete the deployment of approximately 30,000 low-Earth orbit satellite constellations by 2034. The particularity of the space environment requires storage devices to demonstrate excellent performance and strong resistance in multiple aspects such as radiation hardening, high and low temperature tolerance, shock resistance and impact resistance.

As the developer of China's first aerospace-grade storage controller chip, AccuTest Technology has achieved multiple innovations in radiation-hardened technology:

• Chip-level Hardening Design

The Bifort chip adopts special circuit design and process technology to enhance its radiation resistance from the bottom layer.Total dose radiation tolerance (sum of multiple particles): 100 Krads (Si).Its performance against single-event latchup (SEL) exceeds 75 MeV·cm²/mg (LET), and its performance against single-event upset (SEU) is better than (1-E/T) T=1E-4/Component/Day.Fabricated with a 65nm process, the chip has achieved mass production and been applied in a number of key model missions.

• System-level Protection Solution

Through technologies such as Error Correction Code (ECC), redundant design, and wear leveling, the overall reliability of the storage system is further enhanced.It supports a capacity of up to 16Tb and a maximum average read/write speed of 8Gbps.It meets the ever-growing demand for remote sensing data processing.

• Space Environment Adaptability

The product is based on full-stack high-reliability storage technologies including aerospace-grade SSD controller chips, hardened algorithms, a variety of high-reliability IP cores, as well as high-reliability block device drivers and file systems，透To transparently provide the most tailored solutions for diverse aerospace and high-reliability applications，To meet the data storage and management requirements for aerospace applications ranging from 500-kilometer low Earth orbit (LEO) to 36,000-kilometer geosynchronous orbit (GEO).

Meanwhile, at the levels of device screening and architecture construction, it promotes a three-layer in-depth defense system and strives to build a fortress for data integrity.

• Device-level Intelligent Screening and Hardening

A full-life-cycle failure model is established to predict and avoid potential risks. Rigorous quantitative analysis of space environmental characteristics and radiation tests are carried out on industrial-grade 3D NAND flash particles, so as to screen out the batches with optimal radiation-hardening potential.

• Controller Microsystem-level Fault Tolerance

Core algorithms such as enhanced ECC error correction, triple modular redundancy (TMR) mapping tables, and multiple firmware backups are implemented. It monitors in real time and intelligently handles errors such as single-event upsets (SEUs) that may occur in NAND chips to prevent error propagation.

• System-level Redundancy and Self-healing Architecture

It provides self-developed hardened host interface IP cores and block device drivers to ensure reliable access paths, supports on-orbit firmware updating and remote recovery, and features strong self-healing capability to address unknown faults.