Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Impact of gamma radiation on 8051 microcontroller performance

  • Charu Sharma (Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, A CI of Homi Bhabha National Institute) ;
  • Puspalata Rajesh (Water and Steam Chemistry Division, BARC Facilities) ;
  • R.P. Behera (Real Time System Division, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research) ;
  • S. Amirthapandian (Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, A CI of Homi Bhabha National Institute)
  • Received : 2022.03.01
  • Accepted : 2022.08.21
  • Published : 2022.12.25
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Abstract

Studying the effects of gamma radiation on the instrumentation and control (I&C) system of a nuclear power plant is critical to the successful and reliable operation of the plant. In the accidental scenario, the adverse environment of ionizing radiation affects the performance of the I&C system and it leads to inaccurate and incomprehensible results. This paper reports the effects of gamma radiation on the AT89C51RD2, a commercial-off-the-shelf 8-bit high-performance flash microcontroller. The microcontroller, selected for the device under test for this study is used in the remote terminal unit for a nuclear power plant. The custom circuits were made to test the microcontroller under different gamma doses using a 60Co gamma source in both ex-situ and in-situ modes. The device was exposed to a maximum dose of 1.5 kGy. Under this hostile environment, the performance of the microcontroller was studied in terms of device current and voltage changes. It was observed that the microcontroller device can operate up to a total absorbed dose of approximately 0.6 kGy without any failure or degradation in its performance.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

One of the authors (Charu Sharma) is grateful to the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), India for providing financial support in the form of a fellowship. The author would also like to acknowledge the support of staff members of RTSD/IGCAR and WSCD/BARCF during the course of the experiment.

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