Abstract

We present our work on implementing Radiation Hardening by Software (RHBSW) techniques on the Xilinx Virtex5 FPGAs PowerPC 440 processors on the SpaceCube 2.0 platform. The techniques have been matured and tested through simulation modeling, fault emulation, laser fault injection and now in a flight experiment, as part of the Space Test Program-Houston 4-ISS SpaceCube Experiment 2.0 (STP-H4-ISE 2.0). This work leverages concepts such as heartbeat monitoring, control flow assertions, and checkpointing, commonly used in the High Performance Computing industry, and adapts them for use in remote sensing embedded systems. These techniques are extremely low overhead (typically <;1.3%), enabling a 3.3x gain in processing performance as compared to the equivalent traditionally radiation hardened processor. The recently concluded STP-H4 flight experiment was an opportunity to upgrade …

Date

2017

Authors

Andrew G Schmidt, Matthew French, Thomas Flatley

Conference

2017 IEEE Aerospace Conference

Pages

1-8

Publisher

IEEE