Rad-tolerant SBC offers flexible, power-saving coupled with high-performance processing

Citation

(2008), "Rad-tolerant SBC offers flexible, power-saving coupled with high-performance processing", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 80 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2008.12780cad.017

Rad-tolerant SBC offers flexible, power-saving coupled with high-performance processing

Article Type: Equipment and software From: Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology: An International Journal, Volume 80, Issue 3.

Aitech Defense Systems Inc., independent manufacturer of open architecture board and subsystem level products for harsh environment defense, aerospace and astronautics applications, now offers a high- performance, single-slot single board computer that reportedly allows the user to initiate different power-saving options, depending on application requirements.

Specifically, designed for mission- critical space environments, the new 3U CompactPCI radiation-tolerant S950 functions using as little as 13.5W in full operation, less than 8W in nap mode and less than 10W with limited performance for less intense processing requirements, all based on a core processor speed of 733MHz.

The S950 claims extreme protection against single event upsets which is said to make it ideal for a variety of low- earth orbit, Mars terrestrial and geocentric orbit (GEO) applications including redundant mission computers and guidance and navigation computers as well as in command and data handling computers, solid-state recorders and video controllers.

The board incorporates the low- power PowerPCT 750FX Processor with a maximum power dissipation of less than 8W, 128Mb of SDRAM arranged in a bit-wise triple voting architecture and 1Mb of dual- redundant boot Flash to store the onboard Boot firmware. The 32kb L1 cache includes a parity check for both tags and data, while the 512kb L2 cache provides a parity check on tags and ECC protection on data.

A rad-tolerant anti-fuse FPGA maintains the memory controller to ensure data integrity for secure system reliability in harsh space environments. Also implemented on the FPGA is additional ECC protection for the board's 64Mb of user Flash memory, which ensures sufficient memory resources for a variety of applications, as well as two standard serial ports, four independent 32-bit counters/ timers, an onboard hardware watchdog timer, a 32-bit conduction- cooled PMC site and a 32-bit CompactPCI interface operating at 33.333MHz.

For further information, please contact: Aitech Defense Systems Inc., Tel: 888-Aitech-8 248 3248.