Cosmic Rays and Computing

One invisible particle. One corrupted bit. One system that can no longer be trusted.

A computer can produce the wrong answer without a software bug, a broken circuit, or any visible damage.

A high-energy particle crosses a semiconductor. A tiny electrical charge is deposited. A zero becomes a one. The machine keeps running-but its data, calculations, or control decisions may already be compromised.

This is the extraordinary engineering problem at the heart of Cosmic Rays and Computing.

From terrestrial computers to high-altitude aircraft and spacecraft, radiation-induced faults create challenges that ordinary electrical specifications cannot solve. Protecting digital systems requires more than robust components. It requires understanding exactly how particles produce faults-and how those faults can be detected, corrected, contained, and recovered from.

In this expanded Second Edition, Gareth Morgan Thomas connects particle physics, semiconductor technology, digital architecture, and fault-tolerant computing in one comprehensive technical guide.

You will explore:

• Cosmic rays and energetic particles - Their origins, atmospheric interactions, and the distinct hazards of terrestrial, aviation, and space environments.

• Single-event upsets (SEUs) - How deposited charge triggers bit flips, corrupts memory, and propagates through digital logic.

• Semiconductor vulnerability - Critical charge, single-event transients, latchup, multiple-cell upsets, and total ionizing dose.

• Nuclear radiation and EMP - How prompt radiation, neutrons, gamma rays, and electromagnetic pulses threaten electronic systems.

• Radiation-hardened hardware - Design techniques, manufacturing approaches, and the performance and cost trade-offs of resilient components.

• Error detection and correction - ECC, Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon encoding, checksums, and CRCs.

• Real-time fault mitigation - Triple modular redundancy, majority voting, built-in self-test, and memory scrubbing.

• Software fault tolerance - Error monitoring, resilient algorithms, system recovery, and architectures designed to preserve data integrity.

• Radiation-resilient FPGAs - Configuration faults, redundancy, dynamic reconfiguration, and scrubbing.

• Secure computing and physical randomness - Entropy sources, environmental noise, and random-number generation.

• Emerging technologies - AI-assisted fault prediction and future directions in resilient semiconductor and computing design.

A radiation-induced fault is not necessarily a hardware failure. The component may survive while the information it processes becomes wrong.

That distinction changes everything.

This book follows the entire chain: radiation environment, particle interaction, charge collection, circuit response, corrupted logic, and system-level consequences. It then examines the protective methods engineers use to interrupt that chain.

The emphasis is on engineering understanding: mechanisms, mathematical models, practical design principles, and the limitations and trade-offs of different defenses.

Discover how invisible particles threaten digital systems-and how intelligent engineering makes those systems more resilient.

Get your copy of Cosmic Rays and Computing, Second Edition today.