Many of those who could only dream of space exploration in the last 50 years will be traveling to Mars in the next, and companies are already launching products to improve the quality of life of those interplanetary travelers. Given the lengthy process of designing and fabricating radiation hardened commercial chips, however, there are far more legacy Power PC (PPC) devices that clear this hurdle than ARM options.
Not satisfied with the limitations of the status quo, one aerospace company decided on a radiation-hardened FPGA-based platform from Microchip for its solution. With engineering guidance from DornerWorks, the company was able to reduce one of biggest barriers space travelers face when trying to communicate with loved ones back home.
DornerWorks guided the company toward Microchip’s RTG4 radiation tolerant FPGAs rather than a strict software approach.
