Space Micro's Proton100k Computer Launched Into Space

contents

business

Space Micro announces that its Proton100k Space Computer was launched successfully aboard the TacSat-2 Satellite on December 16 at 7 a.m., EST from Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops, VA. The Proton100kTM Radiation Hardened Single Board Computer is the instrument computer of the Air Force Research Laboratory's RoadRunner On-board Processing Experiment, performing data management and processing of focal plane array data. ROPE is one of 11 on-board instrument packages that range from Enhanced Commercial Imager to Integrated GPS Occultation Receiver. Space Micro also supplied the 64 Gbit Solid State Recorder which together made up the core of the on-board processing unit.

The Proton100k is the first-generation design of a line of the fastest, low-power radiation-hardened computers available in the industry today. It is capable of 1,200 MIPS performance at a Single Event Upset rate of 1E-4 unrecoverable errors/day using only 7-9 Watts of power. The Proton100k also has a total dose tolerance of >100 krad (Si). Protection from Single Event Upsets is achieved using Space Micro's patent-pending Time-Triple Modular Redundancy approach, while Single Event Functional Interrupts are mitigated using the patent-pending H-Core technology. Similar techniques are used in Space Micro's second-generation computer, the Proton200k, which offers 4,000 MIPS performance using only 5 Watts of power.

write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page