Quad-core radiation-hardened system-on-chip power architecture processor

Based on the QorIQ^® system-on-chip processor architecture from Freescale Semiconductor with additional unique features for space applications, the RAD55xx^TM system-on-chip platform integrated circuit can be personalized into multiple processor solutions. The RAD55xx platform includes four 32/64 bit Power Architecture^® processor cores, three levels of on-die cache memory, dual interleaved DDR3 DRAM controllers, data path acceleration architecture (DPAA) on-die hardware accelerators, a NAND Flash controller, and high I/O throughput based on serializer/deserializer high speed links. Manufactured at the IBM trusted foundry in 45nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process technology with copper interconnect and leveraging the radiation-hardened by design RH45^TM technology, the RAD55xx platform optimizes power/performance to deliver processor throughput of up to 5.6 GOPS/3.7 GFLOPS, memory bandwidth of up to 102 Gb/s, and I/O throughput of up to 64 Gb/s. Each of the highly efficient RAD5500™ 64-bit cores offers direct addressability to 64 GB of memory, improves double precision floating point performance, and achieves 3.0 Dhrystone MIPS/MHz. The RAD55xx platform is designed for insertion into systems using the SpaceVPX standard, supporting the RapidIO data plane, SpaceWire control plane, and I²C utility plane. Architectural trades, the development methodology, technical challenges, and single board computer solutions are discussed.

1. Introduction

For almost two decades, single board computers for satellite applications have taken advantage of the power-efficient, superscalar Power Architecture. As the capability of these processors increased, applications extended beyond that of a simple flight computer to support higher performance payload applications. However, limited by both process technology and constraints on size, weight, and power (SWaP), only moderate levels of on-board processing were viable.