The complicated electronics now pervading our lives − in our hands, in our cars and orbiting us constantly in satellites − have their own version of Kryptonite: cosmic rays from space that can zap them and cause everything from temporary glitches to potentially catastrophic failures.
Microchip manufacturers need to test their projects and see if they can stand up to that kind of occasional space bombardment, but it’s difficult to replicate those forces here on Earth. But a newly revamped facility at Michigan State University is beginning to meet that space tech-testing need.
Michigan State University’s K500 Chip Testing Facility, inaugurated in February at the university’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), cost approximately $14 million to establish, with funding provided by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project repurposed the campus’ K500 superconducting cyclotron, completed in 1982 for high-energy, heavy-ion research, including producing and accelerating ion beams to study nuclear structure, to now allow the facility to test semiconductors for space, defense and on-Earth applications.
“The 6G cell phone is all going to be satellite-based; a lot of satellite data centers are going into space. So these chips, these power supplies, need to withstand the cosmic rays that hit them all the time,” said Thomas Glasmacher, laboratory director at FRIB.
“Self-driving cars, airplanes, all of the technology humans rely on has to last as the chips get smaller and smaller.”
Cosmic rays are highly energetic subatomic particles − primarily protons and atomic nuclei − traveling through space at nearly the speed of light. Originating from the sun, supernova explosions in the Milky Way and distant galaxies, the rays constantly bombard Earth, with most being deflected by the magnetic field or breaking up in the atmosphere.
These rays, when they hit electronics just right, can cause them to malfunction − a reality that came alarmingly to the forefront in an October 2025 aircraft incident. An Airbus A320 passenger jet operated by JetBlue en route to New Jersey from Cancun, Mexico, experienced a sudden, uncontrolled altitude drop that left 15 passengers injured and requiring hospital treatment after the flight diverted to an emergency landing in Florida. An investigation determined that cosmic ray bombardment caused a malfunction in the aircraft’s flight control computer systems. In late November, Airbus grounded 6,000 of its aircraft for software updates related to the incident, triggering widespread travel disruptions over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The farther into the atmosphere and space technology goes, the more potential there is for cosmic rays to be a problem. Chip makers want to know if their technology can withstand what’s coming, and for how long.
“You need to, in a limited amount of time, provide the kinds of cosmic rays a device or a chip in space sees in 50 years or so,” Glasmacher said. “So with the accelerator, we can give 50 years of cosmic rays in, say, five minutes or five seconds.”
MSU is now one of three heavy ion cyclotron facilities available in the U.S. for chip testing, the others being at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and at Texas A&M University.
MSU’s K500 facility takes a plasma charged with ions through a magnetic field, with the series of magnets and physical slits in the system allowing researchers to filter to the specific ions for which they seek. The ions are then accelerated using massive amounts of energy, 20 million to 40 million electron volts per unit mass, and then essentially shot at a prepared sample of the chip or electronics being tested.
“We give customers a menu, and they order off the menu,” said Steve Lidia, FRIB beam instrumentation and measurement department manager. “We can produce many different types of beams; we can adjust the format in which we need to deliver the beam to the tested product − the time format, the space format, what they need.”
Companies such as Texas Instruments often bring their own chip experts to tweak experiments based on what they are seeing in rounds of testing.
Open for business since the start of the year, the K500 Chip Testing Facility is at about 40% capacity and expected to provide about 2,500 hours of “beam time” to chip-testing clients this year. But plans are in the works to ramp up, with a new 5,500-square-foot addition to the facility for more simultaneous activities.
The K500 not only provides a valuable service to the U.S. government and companies. It provides educational opportunities and hands-on experience for MSU students − and their ability to interact with potential future employers.
“This facility gives us more opportunity, because we have more available hours to train more and more students. They get collaboration with industry, they can work on advancing that technology,” said John Papapolymerou, interim dean of MSU’s College of Engineering.
“It’s extremely important for workforce development in the area of semiconductors, electronics and quantum technology. We need that for both the state of Michigan and the rest of the United States.”
The Leinweber Center for Engineering and Digital Innovation being built at MSU and slated for opening in August 2028 will combine digital learning, advanced research, entrepreneurship and industry. The 265,000-square-foot facility will serve as a convergence point for education, research and career readiness, including materials science, data science, artificial intelligence, space electronics, semiconductor research and more. The activities at the K500 Chip-Testing Facility will be integrated into the research and learning opportunities at the new center, Papapolymerou said.
“I do believe this will be a national hub of training students for designing these types of systems that go into space, testing them, innovating around them,” he said.
Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: MSU facility lets microchip-makers do outer space tests here on Earth
Reporting by Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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