LEON4 Based Radiation-Hardened SpaceVPX System Controller

Abstract

The Advanced Processing and Communications team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has designed and manufactured a new system controller that complies with the 6U SpaceVPX (ANSI/VITA 78) specification and can function as a command- and data-handling single-board computer. The design meets the radiation hardness requirements for application in geosynchronous (GEO) and medium earth orbit (MEO), employs QMLV and Class-S components, has a conduction cooling frame, and is mechanically hardened against typical shock and vibration profiles encountered during launch. The system controller is based on the space grade GR740 quadcore LEON4 processor ASIC with a MicroChip RTG4 field programmable gate array (FPGA) to support hardware coprocessing and supply the gigabit /s serializer-deserializers (SerDes) needed for the VPX control and data planes. This module was designed to allow interoperability between OpenVPX (ANSI/VITA 65) and SpaceVPX so that lower cost hardware from the commercial world can be used during the prototyping process instead of more expensive flight like hardware. This design has 1 GByte of SDRAM with an additional ½ GByte of error detection and correction memory (EDAC). Since SDRAM is susceptible to single event functional interrupts (SEFIs), the design team used byte-wide aspect ratio memories with individual power control for recovery. This paper will discuss the performance, power consumption, and status of this design.