As space missions travel farther from Earth, spacecraft must increasingly process and store their own data, and AI is expected to become the primary tool for managing that growing volume. The memory underpinning those systems needs to hold up in one of the harshest environments imaginable.

Conventional NAND flash memory, the same technology found in smartphones, laptops, and data centers, is the current state-of-the-art for storing large volumes of data in space, offering storage capacities in the terabit range. But radiation in space can degrade it significantly. Radiation interacts with the trapped electrical charges that store data, corrupting it.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a version of NAND flash memory built from ferroelectric materials that can withstand radiation levels 30 times higher than conventional NAND. The findings are published in Nano Letters.

Why polarization holds where charge fails

Ferroelectricity refers to the ability of certain materials to maintain a permanent, spontaneous electric polarization. That polarization stores data differently from conventional NAND — and that difference matters under radiation.

“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, associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in a press release. “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 material that makes this possible is hafnium oxide, a silicon-compatible compound in which ferroelectricity was first discovered 15 years ago. Khan’s lab has spent the past decade determining its capabilities. Even so, the degree of radiation tolerance the new architecture demonstrated came as a surprise to the team.

What the tests showed

Lance Fernandes, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering and the paper’s first author, fabricated the ferroelectric NAND chips in Georgia Tech’s cleanroom before sending them to collaborators at Pennsylvania State University for radiation testing.

The chips withstood up to 1 million rads — radiation absorbed doses — equivalent to 100 million X-rays. That figure covers the full radiation range spacecraft encounter: low-Earth orbit satellites require tolerance between 5,000 and 30,000 rads; geostationary orbit demands between 100,000 and 300,000 rads; deep space missions reach 1 million rads.

“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.”

The research was supported by SUPREME, part of the JUMP 2.0 program run by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and sponsored by DARPA, and by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency under the Department of Defense.