Radiation-Hardened SpaceVPX FPGA Module

The Advanced Processing and Communications team at Los Alamos National Laboratory is designing a 3U VPX FPGA module interoperable with both the SpaceVPX (ANSI/VITA 78) and OpenVPX (ANSI/VITA 65) Module standards. Designed for long-duration missions, this module offers reprogrammability, memory, and functionality for sensor interfaces. Despite use of QML-V and S-class parts in order to satisfy long-duration missions, the module is predicted to consume less than 5W of power. This design incorporates a radiation-hardened 32-bit microcontroller with a RISC-based architecture and a radiation-hardened Microchip RTG4 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to provide a robust sensor interface suitable for geosynchronous (GEO), low-earth orbit (LEO), and medium-earth orbit (MEO) missions. This design will also support a mixture of Gigabit/s class high-speed serial and SpaceWire ports, enabling high-performance interfaces with other VPX modules.