Space Micro Inc. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: Z2

Description

NASA needs enhanced high-performance space computing technology for future missions. Current radiation hardened solutions are power inefficient and lack significant computing performance compared to current commercial capabilities. Some modern technology or process nodes have inherent radiation resistance due to the fabrication methods; partially depleted, fully depleted, and FinFET gates; and the use of silicon-on-insulator. Combining processors implemented with these technologies alongside Space Microrsquo;s patented upset mitigation techniques, blind scrubbing, and execution checkpoints, yield a space-grade COTS processor with 1000 times more performance than current radiation-hardened processors.Space Micro proposes the development of a 3U SpaceVPX, radiation-tolerant, high-performance, reconfigurable single board computer (SBC) based on the Xilinx Versal VC1902. Space Micro has named this new SBC the Proton High-Performance Reconfigurable (PHiRetrade;) SBC. This SBC offers enhanced parallel processing and artificial intelligence power, much to the effect of a supercomputer cluster. The main system would have the ability to reconfigure this SBC to scale up and down performance of the scalar and parallel processing units to limit power dissipation, specifying a specific state depending on the needs of the current task.The PHiRetrade; SBC utilizes the Xilinx 7nm Versal VC1902 which provides dual ARM Cortex-A72 application processors, dual ARM Cortex-R5F real-time processors, 400 artificial intelligence inference engines, 1,968 DSP engines, and 1,968 reprogrammable system logic cells which combine to provide the following figures of merit:AI Engine Peak Performance:nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; 8 TFLOPSDSP Engine Peak Performance:nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; 3.2 TFLOPSAdaptable Engine Peak Performance:nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; 29 TOPSArm Cortex-A72 Peak Performance:nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; 18,942 DMIPSArm Cortex-R5F Peak Performance:nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; 2.672 DMIPS