Higher performance BAE systems processors and interconnects enabling spacecraft applications

Over the past decade, the amount of processing utilized in spacecraft has increased. From below 1 MIP in the 1980s to single digit MIPS in the early 1990s to 10s of MIPS by the end of the twentieth century to hundreds of MIPS today, the amount of processing is in an upward trend paralleling though lagging the commercial and military embedded processing markets. This has allowed processing to move from simple control and data handling (C&DH) into payloads and other data processing intensive areas. Along with this memory capacities have increased to provide storage for programs and data.