A reliable infrastructure based on COTS technology for affordable space application

The benefit of using COTS technology for space onboard computing applications is compelling, as most new NASA applications demand the highest performance but with severely constrained budgets. COTS products are designed, however, to address the mass market and do not account for the unique requirements of the space applications. Fortunately, in a coincidence of requirements, commercial technology products for desktop computing, imaging, and wireless applications also demand the highest quality and reliability and with lowest power consumption. An encouraging trend from recent radiation test results conducted on mainstream COTS computing devices manufactured using leading foundry processes (e.g. microprocessors and memories) which show total dose performance with latch-up immunity that are deemed suitable for many space applications. However, these same tests also show that nearly all COTS devices exhibit some degree of single event upset (SEU) induced by cosmic particles that would interfere with correct system performance and potentially corrupt data. This paper discusses a combined hardware and software approach to provide SEU mitigation techniques to achieve reliable, scalable high performance computing systems using COTS products in spaceborne environments. A First Generation Testbed has been developed under the Remote Exploration and Experimentation project to validate this concept.