You may not have heard of Microchip Technology, and you probably didn't know NASA was interested in chips. But now the two have joined forces to create a particularly exciting processor for the space industry.
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Chips are the new oil, and since the dawn of the AI revolution the semiconductor industry has been enjoying a relentless flood of investor capital.
But the big money and development efforts are focused primarily on personal computers and the massive server farms on the ground, with very few resources directed toward processors designed for space.
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The main challenge with using processors in space is radiation.
Earth's magnetic field is a natural radiation shield, protecting electronic devices from charged particles and solar storms that can easily destroy or disrupt electronics.
Space processors also can't be replaced, repaired, or rebooted. They simply have to work from day one — continuously and without errors.
This resilience is achieved by using relatively large transistors that are less sensitive to radiation. They are protected inside a radiation-shielding enclosure and execute every computational process 3 times in parallel, so that if one transistor's state is altered by a radiation strike, the processor relies on the result of the other two processes — because they form the majority.
Manufacturing processors for spacecraft is so complex that the space industry still relies on technologies from the 1990s.
NASA and Microchip Technology have announced a collaboration to produce a new chip expected to be one hundred times faster than existing ones. It will be based on the system-on-chip architecture now widely used, in which all components are placed on a single piece of silicon and share data at extremely high bandwidth. It will also enable energy savings by remotely powering down some cores when they aren't needed or when power is scarce.
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There are two more interesting points about this development.
One is that two versions will be developed: one for deep-space operation, which will be heavily shielded and highly fault-tolerant; and a second, less expensive version aimed at the rapidly growing market of low-Earth-orbit communication satellites. At low Earth orbit, Earth's magnetic field still provides partial protection, which allows the use of less radiation-hardened and more affordable processors.
The second interesting point is that, as has happened before, this new space technology may eventually find its way back to Earth — serving as a reliable processing system for environments that are difficult to maintain or that demand absolute precision, such as nuclear reactors, energy infrastructure, and medical systems.
Image credit: NASA.
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