Major Problems/Issues in Developing a Space Reconfigurable Computing System and Potential Solutions

1. Major Problems/Issues in Developing a Space Reconfigurable Computing System and Potential Solutions Jeremy Ramos Honeywell DSES jeremy.ramos@honeywell.com

2. Major Problems/Issues • Non Technical Problems/Issues • Culture • Resistance to change • Microprocessors and ASICs are kings of their own domains with a significant foothold and organizational structure to back them up. • Some misunderstanding of what RC is and what it can do for missions • Solution: Get a good marketing engineer and give her a large expense account • Human Resources • Not many people are trained in the area of RC or have the necessary skills to design, develop, and implement RC systems and applications • Solution: Select One • train hardware engineers to be RC engineers • train software engineers to be RC engineers • Wait for the right people to develop • Technology funding for RC • Not much technology funding is available for space RC. • In order to overcome “first adopter” reluctance, more research needs to be funded to demonstrate successful deployment of RC in space • Solution: See the solution for culture issue above • Lack of Standards • Need to develop standard RC languages, tool flows, interfaces, libraries, and architectures. • What is the equivalent of an ISA (instruction set architecture) for an RC system? • Solution: Find a PhD candidate and convince them this is a worthwhile dissertation topic. • Solution: Develop an industry consortium to establish standards based on research and practical experience.

3. Major Problems/Issues • Technical Problems/Issues • Lack of RC Devices • The market is lacking true RC device offerings. • FPGAs are a good start, but they are truly not RC devices. Rather they are the best thing engineers could find to implement RC systems. • Solution: Develop designs for RC devices that take advantage of RC research performed in the last 15 years. • Fault Tolerance • Available devices do not address fault tolerance • Effective fault tolerance design could solve problems with soft errors. • Natural Radiation Effects • Total Ionization Dose for available devices is sufficient for short duration missions. Higher TID needs will require microelectronics process changes. • SEEs are a major issue for COTS devices and current solutions consist of “patches” that increase system complexity and inefficiency. • Power and Efficiency • Power constraints in space applications demand high efficiency from microelectronics. • FPGAs are very inefficient with significant idle resources. • Floating Point • Available devices do not support floating point. • Most space applications either require or demand floating point algorithm implementation. • Packaging • Conflict between the need for high pin count devices and the reliability of those packages for space applications • Solution: Need to foster continued development of standardized components with high-speed serial interfaces -- RapidIO, etc.