Fault Tolerant RISC-V Flight Computer with Coprocessor Support

This Phase II project aims to prototype a novel technology that can advance the state-of-the-art in high performance space computing.nbsp; The base computer technology, called ldquo;RadPCrdquo;, brings together a suite of fault recovery mechanisms that enable Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to operate reliably in the presence of space radiation that causes single event effects (SEEs).nbsp; The RadPC concept has been matured for over 12 years in the research labs of Montana State University (MSU).nbsp; Through over $6M in NASA research funding, RadPC has been tested on high-altitude balloons (8x), sounding rockets (2x), the International Space Station (3x), and on small satellites (2x).nbsp; In 2024, the RadPC base computer will be tested on a lunar mission through the NASA Lunar Surface Instruments and Technology Payloads (LSITP) program to stress its SEE recovery mechanisms while passing through the Earthrsquo;s radiation belts and operating outside of the Earthrsquo;s magnetic field.nbsp; In 2021, RadPC was licensed to Resilient Computing to begin its commercialization efforts.nbsp; Through a 2021 NASA SBIR Phase I award, the MSU version of RadPC was refined to use a RISC-V architecture to make the computer suitable for real space missions.nbsp; Through a 2022 NASA SBIR Phase I award, a feasibility study was conducted to evaluate if coprocessors could be embedded within the RadPC architecture in order to accelerate computation while still maintaining the reliability that RadPCrsquo;s SEE recovery procedures provide.nbsp; The 2022 Phase I study devised a strategy to successfully include coprocessors into RadPC to perform computationally intense tasks while being able to be repaired through the existing recovery procedures.nbsp; This Phase II project aims to develop a prototype of the RadPC+coprocessor system to test its computational performance and reliability while conducting object detection algorithms on real-time camera data.nbsp;