Heavy Ion Induced Single Event Effects Characterization on an RF-Agile Transceiver for Flexible Multi-Band Radio Systems in NewSpace Avionics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper, the AD9361, a highly integrated RF-agile transceiver device has been tested under heavy ion irradiation. Due to the DUTs complexity a straight forward heavy ion radiation test procedure is not applicable and a specific test methodology has been designed successfully. The DUT has been characterized in a high level of detail to its behavior under irradiation and shows a very robust response.The experimental contents are sufficient and the experimental results support the conclusion, which is of great significance to the current space irradiation research. What needs to be considered is whether the method proposed in this paper and the conclusions obtained have universal applicability.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

first of all, we would like to thank you for your time! We highly appreciate you feedback and comments. According to you you review we revised the paper and highlighted any modification in the document. Additionally please find below our response to you specific comment:

*What needs to be considered is whether the method proposed in this paper and the conclusions obtained have universal applicability

Yes, indeed it would be very intersting to give a outlook if the proposed test methodology of such complex and highly intergrated devices allows a generic or universal applicability. We assume that this methodology allows also to be used for other devices with compareable complexities but should be related to RF and ditigial signal processing (specifically the in-situ RF signal detection). We added the following sentence in the conclusion:

"The proposed test methodology could be applicable to other devices with such complex integrity, specifically related to the RF and digital processing domain. However, it still needs to be considered to adapt or optimized these test procedures for each individual DUT or even system under test."

Thanks again for you effort

Jan Budroweit

Reviewer 2 Report

1.The description of DUTs and experiment method is a little too much (The words, not the details).

2.If you can give some information of the correspondence between the function registers and the SEFIs (A list is good). 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

first of all, we would like to thank you for your time! We highly appreciate your feedback and comments. According to your review we revised the paper and highlighted any modification in the document. Additionally, please find below our response to you specific comment(s):

1.The description of DUTs and experiment method is a little too much (The words, not the details).

We reduced the words to a minimum concering the DUT and experimantal method section. We tried to keep the content as low as possible but hope not to loose any important information.

2.If you can give some information of the correspondence between the function registers and the SEFIs (A list is good)

A list for the SEU and SEFI ratio is presented in Table 3. Practically, there could be many registers responsible for SEFI events, especifically if those register have a dependency to other functional registers. It might be possible to verify each register that affect to a SEFI and present a list, but for research purposes, that might be not of interest. Furthermore, this list could be very long as the total number of registers of the DUT is greater then 1000.

Thanks again for your effort

Jan Budroweit

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very nice paper.  I enjoyed reading it.  Everything is well explained.  The organization of the paper makes it easy to follow the progression of the experiment and data.  Any questions I had while reading were answered within a couple of paragraphs.  The experimental process appears to be very thorough, as is the data analysis.

I struggled to find things to correct, but here is my small list of minor issues:

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

first of all, we would like to thank you for your time! We highly appreciate your feedback and comments. According to your review we revised the paper and highlighted any modification in the document. Additionally, please find below our response to you specific comment(s):

*You write "Analoge Devices" in line 49 and "Analog Devices" on line 105. Also, "analog devices" on line 107 should be capitalized.

We revised that, thanks! (Analog Devices is correct)

*It would be nice to see Figure 9a and 9b plotted on the same scale for comparison, like you did for Fig 11 and 12.

We modified the scale in the revised document. But it needs to be considered that both plots have different type of errors. Fig. 9a shows the cross-section for SEUs and Fig. 9b shows the cross-section response for MBUs. A straight comparison is probably not important like for example on the same failure but for two different samples.

*I think Fig 20 should not be a bar chart, but should instead show error bars.

To be honest, we copied the style from the NASA paper for comparison purposes and bars show more clearly also small differences. However, we modified the Figures and took a smaller/close scale for the y-axis to highlight the differences.

Thanks again for your effort

Jan Budroweit