Résumé
Since the time of the most ancient civilisations, space has always been an endless source of wonder and curiosity. Today, we know that space environment represents a huge challenge for human kind. Indeed, the presence of different radiation sources render it a rough and dangerous place for human and electronics devices. Nevertheless, Space could not be considered as an independent ecosystem since Satellite are key factor of our daily life on Earth. In practice, they allow not only communications, but also the monitoring of ice melt, crop field, natural resource exploitation, climate change, tsunami prediction and so on. Moreover, important next decade scientific results, heavily rely on International Space Station projects where micro-gravity experiments are restlessly carried out.In the last couple of years, the renovate interest for deeper space missions such as Lunar and Mars exploration have driven agencies into a huge investment in the R&D sector looking for new, robust, technology. This attention for the space sector made somebody dreaming the human kind to become an interplanetary species one day in the future, hundreds of years from now. Or in a more prosaic way, it has sparked the interest of private sector and commercialization to mark a transition from exploration to exploitation of other planets natural resources; or simply to make money with space tourism. Although an ethical reflection on this topic represents a fascinating challenge, in this scientific work we aim to push the boundaries of technological means which could made some of these scenarios a reality. In particular, as traditional electronics is based on charge storage it is prone to experiment many harmful effects in Space. For this motivation non-charge based devices have been intensively investigated in the last decade, to the point that the first generation of Magnetic Memories (FIMS-Toggle) have been embedded on the Perseverance Rover, successfully landed on Mars on February 18th 2021 to carry back on Earth sample of Martian rock and regolith in ten years from now. Oriented towards the future, this work aims to contribute to the study of space irradiation effects on the last generation of spintronic devices.The work is organized as follows: first chapter gives an overview on the different families of Emerging Non Volatile Memories highlighting the advantages and drawbacks in the use of each. In the second chapter we depict in detail the space environment, its radiation sources and the effects that they have on electronics. In chapter three we explore how spintronic devices could be used at design/circuit level to enhance the tolerance against irradiation. In the fourth chapter we conduct a detailed study on heavy ion effect on Spin-Transfer Torque devices both from a theoretical and experimental point of view. In particular the role of thermal spike in the failure mechanism is for the first time taken into account. This chapter represents an important contribution to the state of the art, since basic mechanisms in such a device were not yet studied. In the last chapter we irradiated the same family of devices with proton and also, we exposed to this radiation the latest spintronic technology, not yet commercialized, the Spin-Orbit Torque Magnetic Tunnel Junction. The latter represents the first result on these devices.