Radiation Hard Space Wire Gigabit Ethernet Compatible Transponder

High-bandwidth, Radiation Hardening, low-power, low-EMI, easily reconfigurable and upgradeable transponder-based interconnects between processor nodes, subsystems, and blocks are of utmost importance for the achievement of high performance computing on orbit and for providing reliable electronic systems in natural space and terrestrial radiation environments. In response to the described needs, we will develop a novel, monolithic radiation-tolerant transponder, which will be integrated into a hermetically-sealed pigtailed multi-chip module, containing opto-electrical and electro-optical components. Module will be featuring FPGA-friendly parallel interface and will provide an improved radiation tolerance, high data rate, low power consumption, and advanced functionality. The developed ASIC transponder will utilize our patent-pending high-speed current-mode logic library of TID-tolerant-by-technology and SEU/SEE-tolerant-by-architecture cells. 8B10B encoding will be used to achieve data disparity equal to 0, optimize performance of the optical receiver, and perform a reliable clock recovery. The encoder and decoder will utilize our patented radiation tolerant half-rate architecture. A fully functional module will be delivered and tested at the end of Phase II.