Product category:
Recruitment, Reports and Resources
News Release from: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 28 April 2006
FPGAs set to enable supercomputing in
space
Los Alamos National Laboratory has received funding for a new space payload which dramatically increases on-orbit computational capabilities.
Los Alamos National Laboratory has received funding for a new space payload which dramatically increases on-orbit computational capabilities The project is jointly sponsored by the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Office of Nonproliferation Research and Development (NA-22), and the US Department of Defense
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Nov 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Engineers and technicians must be trained
Leading UK engineering and technology firms, with a combined multi-million pound spend on training and development, will assemble at the IEE 'Investing in Technical Teams' forum on 4 November 2004.
Workshop gives complete picture on CE.NET 5.0
A UK-based workshop will give embedded software development engineers hands-on experience in running the new 5.0 release of Windows CE.NET on next generation processors.
The experimental payload will demonstrate and validate technologies offering more than 1000 billion operations-per-second processing capability for software-defined radio (SDR) functions in space.
SDR is a technology of interest to the military to support tactical communications and to commercial television and radio broadcasting.
The payload computer's signal-processing capability is approximately the same as supercomputers of the last decade, which occupied 1500m3 and used 50kW of power.
Further reading
DSP seminars focus on video applications
Abacus Polar is hosting two DSP seminars with Texas Instruments.
Latest Verilog standard released
IEEE 1364-2001, the Verilog hardware description language (HDL) standard, also known as Verilog-2001, was approved by the IEEE as a revised standard in March of this year.
SDF gains IEEE approval
Accellera's Standard Delay Format (SDF) has been approved as IEEE Standard 1497-2001, and is now available from the IEEE.
This new payload, by contrast, is designed to weigh 18kg and consume only 80W, a performance which is enabled by state-of-the-art 90nm Virtex-4 silicon-chip technology from Xilinx.
NNSA Programme Manager W Randy Bell said: "Los Alamos' new payload project will be a path-breaker for our Space Nuclear Explosion Monitoring (SNEM) programme, enabling us to meet stringent new requirements for less weight and power, while growing our ability to discriminate nuclear-explosion-related signals versus natural and man-made background signals".
The portfolio manager for space nuclear explosion monitoring, Mark Hodgson, came to Los Alamos from a career in USAF space innovation.
He discussed the new technology's potential: "Our sensors on the Global Positioning System and Defense Satellite Programme platforms have been severely constrained by the data downlinks available".
Hodgson continued: "This new reprogrammable, supercomputing-payload technology enables our science staff to use in space the algorithms and methods previously only possible in ground-based mainframe computers, and to continually modify those methods in-situ, for better performance as science knowledge improves".
Los Alamos Senior Project Leader Mark Dunham helped pioneer reconfigurable computing (RCC) at Los Alamos, the technology on which the software defined radio payload is based.
DOE, DOD and DARPA began sponsorship of RCC at Los Alamos in 1993, leading to the successful development of the CIBOLA Flight Experiment, which is set to launch this fall on a US Air Force Atlas-V rocket.
The new payload draws heavily on the high-performance system-on-chip capabilities provided by Xilinx 's latest Virtex-4 family of platform field-programmable gate array (FPGA), on Atmel Corporation's new AT697 RadHard SPARC processor, and on BAE Systems' new chalcogenide C-RAM.
"By using these and other new technologies, our design advances the state of space processing by two generations, enabling dramatically more flexible commercial and military communications satellite capabilities".
"Two of the major obstacles for lower-cost satellite systems have been payload obsolescence and excessive development time", Dunham said.
Xilinx's partnership with Los Alamos in space-based reconfigurable computing was announced in a joint press release in 2000, and it continues today with the Virtex-4 90nm domain-optimised FPGA.
Aerospace and Defense Director Rick Padovani said: "The space and defence business is a major growth segment for Xilinx and we look forward to continuing the successful co-operation with LANL for Virtex-4 and beyond".
"Quick migration of our latest generation silicon into space is a key goal of our programme".
"We are proud to be part of a team enabling this leap in defence capability".
The Virtex-4 device is now being tested for space use by the team of Los Alamos, Aerospace Corporation, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Xilinx.
• Los Alamos National Laboratory: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Electronicstalk email newsletter
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
