Radiation-Tolerant, Space Wire-Compatible Switching Fabric

Current and future programs of near-Earth and deep space exploration require the development of faster and more reliable electronics with open system architectures that are reconfigurable, fault-tolerant, and can operate effectively for long periods of time in harsh environments. Existing data transfer systems based on passive backplanes are slow, power hungry, hardly reconfigurable, and feature high latency, limited expandability, and low radiation tolerance. During Phase I, our company has proven in computer simulations the basic concept of a radiation tolerant switching fabric backplane with reconfigurable serial interfaces. During Phase II, the company proposes to develop a functional prototype of a novel, radiation-tolerant, switching fabric with user-programmable interfaces that support either Space Wire or the company's proprietary multi-level interconnect solution. The patent-pending multi-level interconnect technique provides improved serial point-to-point link functionality including lower latency, higher speed and lower power consumption. It eliminates the requirement of the second information channel utilized in Space Wire's data-strobe encoding scheme, which can be instead used as a redundant channel to improve the system's fault tolerance. The unprecedented reliability of the developed system-on-chip is guaranteed by utilization of inherently radiation-tolerant SiGe hetero-junction bipolar transistors in proprietary circuit structures that are specifically hardened to single-event effects.