Radiation Hardened Ethernet PHY and Switch Fabric

Innoflight will develop a new family of radiation hardened (up to 3 Mrad(Si)), fault-tolerant, high data-rate (up to 8 Gbps), low power Gigabit Ethernet PHY and Switch chips to meet a critical need in the space industry. Modern spacecraft payloads demand high throughput while maintaining extremely high levels of reliability and fault tolerance. Currently, no standardized protocols presently offer space-level products that provide gigabit-class throughputs. One-off protocols have many drawbacks including long development times, high potential for error, a lack of existing materials, and do not lend themselves to easy prototyping since COTS products are unavailable.These chips will retain the power of using the Ethernet standard but will be extended in an innovative way that will allow data rates up to 8 Gbps per port but will still be compatible with ground hardware for development purposes. Through automated fault monitoring the PHY chip will be automatically detect link failures and the only adverse effect will be a reduction in throughput.