Silicon Space Technology Corporation — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S3

Description

We will develop a fault-tolerant architecture and IC specification for a RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA) based System-on-Chip (SoC). We will implement the IC as a monolithic SoC to optimize the size, weight and power consumption over that which can be accomplished using an FPGA. The IC architecture will be based upon industry standard, state-of-the-art IP and will be scalable to easily allow the creation of further ICs with different IP blocks, scalable fault-tolerance and reuse of software across different products based upon the base architecture.VORAGO Technologies has experience of implementing the RISC-V ISA on a Microsemi RTG4 FPGA. The existing VORAGO product portfolio consists of rad-hard Arm Cortex-M MCUs. We can satisfy a demand for fault-tolerant, small-footprint, low-power RISC-V based SoCs by consolidating the RISC-V ISA with the radiation-hardened SoC technology (HARDSILreg;) that has already been proven by VORAGO.nbsp;Besides replacing the Arm Cortex-M core with the RISC-V ISA, we will further optimize the fault-tolerant topology of the SoC to achieve a high level of radiation performance that is scalable for use in the harshest environments. This will allow all IP to be implemented in Triple Modular Redundant (TMR) form if required. We plan to use the industry-standard AMBA bus on the SoC to allow easy integration of industry-standard IP blocks. The IP will be implemented in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code.nbsp;We will implement this SoC device in the smallest possible package and it will provide the following advantages over RISC-V implementations in FPGAs:Smaller package footprintLower power consumptionLighter weightBetter or equivalent radiation performanceHigh performance due to tightly-coupled SoC integration of IP blocks.nbsp;Smaller die size and low unit cost of SoC over FPGAsScalable architecture to facilitate the creation of a family of products with different functional capabilities that can re-use the same RISC-V software base