Hard to believe the Soviets were using vacuum tubes instead of transistors In hindsight, the MiG 25, which the West had been so worried about, turned out to be a ‘paper tiger’. Its massive radar was years behind US models because instead of transistors it used antiquated vacuum tubes (a technology that did, however, make it impervious to electromagnetic pulses from nuclear blasts). The huge engines required so much f…
The factoid about resistance to EMP gets repeated endlessly online and in print, but it doesn't really make sense, and I doubt it's true. EMP damages electrical connections which are: a) long. b) thin. c) far from a ground plane. In more detail: the induced current depends directly on the length of the conductor; a thin is more easily overheated and damaged than a thick one; and conductors running near ground planes…
What you are talking about is true only for inductive coupling caused by fluctuating EM waves.
As someone who works in Embedded Electronics and Software for Aerosopace let me drop a little knowledge bomb.
The problem isn't with induction, all the units can be easily shielded from this and they are in EMC chambers every day. A simply faraday cage, some bypass and reservoir capacitors a choke here and there an opto-isolator on box boundaries and bobs your uncle.
The real problem with High Energy Particles (Neutrons, Gamma particles, Protons, etc) is that they displace atoms in your semiconductor lattice and change the doping densities and behaviours of your junctions. Causing your semiconductor to fail... HARD.
When we buy in components, we tend to buy rad-hard devices which have special considerations taken into account when designing the semiconductors because when you're in space, you're bombarded with LOADS of high energy particles all the time, and its not just enough to have memory TMR, you need RAD-HARDENED semiconductors.