Resilient Afforable Cubesat Processor

Advanced Materials Applications, LLC (AMA) proposes the Resilient Affordable Computing Platform (RACP), a power-efficient high-performance space computer design for low-Earth orbit (LEO) missions. RACP?s hybrid design combines the state of the art ARM System on Chip (SoC) processors with a non-radiation-hard-by-design FPGA and a radiation tolerant microcontroller to deliver fault tolerance, data integrity, and scalable performance. RACP?s physical dimensions and low power consumption make it ideal for vehicles as small as CubeSats. RACP includes custom health monitoring software that continuously watches vulnerable components for potential latch-up or degradation due to radiation exposure and takes corrective action as needed. RACP will consume between 0.53 to 8.7 Watts of peak power depending on clock speed and workload. At the high end, its compute performance will exceed 25,000 Dhrystone Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS), 2,100 Whetstone Millions of Floating Point Operations Per Second (MFLOPS) and 9,200 Whetstone Millions of Fixed Point Operations Per Second (MOPS). RACP will support multiple sensor platforms with the primary application of data processing. The processors will use a Linux operating system, which means that mission software can be built and tested with standard open source software tools. Finally, components of RACP will be screened through radiation testing to ensure that the computer will operate reliably for a remote sensing low-Earth orbit (LEO) mission. More »