Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

6 hours ago

Sandia National Laboratory started designing, fabricating, and testing ICs in the late 1970s to produce radiation-hardened components for weapons and space missions, such as the Galileo probe.
The lab's fab began with 2″ wafers on a 10μm process in 1978, upgrading to 4″ wafers with 2μm features by 1982, used for over 50,000 ICs in the Galileo mission.
Sandia converted the Intel 8085 to the rad-hard CMOS SA3000 in 1982, increasing transistors from 6,500 to 18,000 and using a 3μm process on 4″ wafers.
The SA3000 operated at 4.5-11V for radiation tolerance, with support chips like SA3001 and SA3002, and could withstand 1×10^6 rads with a 25% performance drop.
Key applications included the W88 nuclear warhead on Trident II, Ball Aerospace's star tracker, and the CRRES satellite, though a battery failure shortened CRRES's mission.
In the mid-1980s, Allied Signal took over fab operations, slowing production; Harris commercialized the SA3000 in 1990 as the HS1-80C85RH (space grade) and HS9-80C85RH (military grade).

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