Tonight we research in hell !

Awesome stuff.

Behind sealed doors stood a 14-ton stainless steel tank, its massive ports sealed to hold pressures so high that the screws to secure its nuts have their own nuts. For 33 days, the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER) had run nonstop, simulating an atmosphere at 460°C and flooded with carbon dioxide at pressures that render it supercritical, both liquid and gas. Inside sat two microchips, pulsing with metronomic accuracy. Neudeck was running a clock on Venus, and it was keeping perfect time.

Rather than barricading electronics within pressure vessels, by early next decade NASA may be able to land simple unprotected robots on Venus that can measure wind, temperature, chemistry, pressure, and seismic waves. And instead of running for a few hours, the landers could last for months. "We don't have the world's fastest chips," Neudeck says. "We don't have the world's most complex chips. But in terms of Venus environment durability—that's what we got."

Silicon carbide has a bigger bandgap than silicon, which means its electrons can absorb much more energy before it becomes a conductor. As a result, it functions as a semiconductor at much higher temperatures. But it is difficult to work with. Because silicon carbide doesn't melt, the techniques used to produce large silicon wafers break down.

The allure of high-temperature electronics was too great to ignore, however. Slowly, with the support of NASA and the Office of Naval Research, researchers, led especially by Cree, an upstart electronics company, devised ways to grow usable silicon carbide crystals more than 150 millimeters in diameter. The power industry is now harnessing the material to build smaller transformers and more efficient power plants, Neudeck says.

Pentiums these are not. A modern silicon chip can contain 7 billion transistors; each of the chips running in the Venus chamber has 175. Neudeck also uses an old-school transistor design, long since abandoned in conventional microelectronics. It's basically a hyperexpensive, obtuse pocket calculator. But a pocket calculator running on Venus could be valuable indeed. "This is already the complexity of many of the early scientific missions flown back in the '60s and '70s," Neudeck says, and more powerful than the chips on Apollo flight computers. "You really can do science."


http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/armed-tough-computer-chips-scientists-are-ready-return-hell-venus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuR5ect-B34