Space missions heading deeper into the solar system are producing more data than ever, and onboard systems will increasingly need to process and store it without constant help from Earth. That shift is pushing spacecraft toward AI-driven autonomy, where memory systems must be fast, dense, and above all, reliable in extreme conditions.

Today, most spacecraft rely on NAND flash memory — the same core technology used in smartphones, laptops, and data centers — to store large volumes of data. It offers terabit-scale capacity and low power use, but it was never designed for deep-space radiation environments where particles can steadily degrade stored information.

To address this limitation, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new type of NAND flash memory that can support AI workloads while surviving far harsher radiation exposure than current systems.

Their approach replaces conventional charge-based storage with a ferroelectric design, which stores information using stable electrical polarization inside the material itself. That shift makes the memory far less vulnerable to radiation-induced corruption that typically disrupts stored charge in standard flash systems.

Built for deep space

In tests described in a recent study, the ferroelectric NAND flash showed radiation tolerance up to 30 times higher than conventional flash memory. That level of durability could make it suitable for missions far beyond Earth’s orbit, where radiation exposure is a major limiting factor for onboard electronics.

“If you send traditional flash memory to space, the radiation interacting with flash memory’s trapped electric charge can easily corrupt the data,” said Asif Khan, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “In contrast, ferroelectric NAND flash storage does not store data as trapped electrical charge, but rather stores it as polarization in the material. And polarization is very resilient to radiation effects.”

The key material enabling this shift is hafnium oxide, a silicon-compatible compound in which ferroelectric behavior was only discovered about 15 years ago. Over the past decade, researchers have been studying how to integrate it into real memory architectures that could operate under extreme conditions.

Radiation limits rewritten

To validate the technology, Ph.D. researcher Lance Fernandes fabricated the memory chips in Georgia Tech’s cleanroom and sent them to Pennsylvania State University for radiation testing. The results showed the devices could withstand up to 1 million rads — equivalent to roughly 100 million X-rays — without losing reliability.

“For data storage in space, it’s not enough for memory to work. It has to remain reliable under extreme radiation,” said Fernandes.

“And what makes our storage especially exciting,” added Khan, “is that ferroelectric NAND flash isn’t just radiation-tolerant; it also stays reliable even in extremely harsh radiation environments. That’s exactly what we need for space.”

This puts the technology within the requirements of even deep-space missions, including future probes heading toward the outer planets and their moons, where communication delays make onboard data integrity essential.

Beyond storage, the advance also strengthens the case for AI-enabled spacecraft that can process large datasets locally instead of relying on Earth-based computation.

The work was supported in part by SUPREME, one of seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA. The work was performed as part of the Interaction of Ionizing Radiation With Matter University Research Alliance, sponsored by the Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, under grant HDTRA1-20-2-0002.