1. Major Problems/Issues in Developing a Space Reconfigurable Computing System and Potential Solutions Jeremy Ramos Honeywell DSES jeremy.ramos@honeywell.com

2. Ramos 2 /MAPLD 2005 Major Problems/Issues  Non Technical Problems/Issues  Culture  Resistance to change  Microprocessors and ASICs are kings of their own domains with a significant foothold and organizational structure to back them up.  Some misunderstanding of what RC is and what it can do for missions  Solution: Get a good marketing engineer and give her a large expense account  Human Resources  Not many people are trained in the area of RC or have the necessary skills to design, develop, and implement RC systems and applications  Solution: Select One a)train hardware engineers to be RC engineers b)train software engineers to be RC engineers c)Wait for the right people to develop  Technology funding for RC  Not much technology funding is available for space RC.  In order to overcome “first adopter” reluctance, more research needs to be funded to demonstrate successful deployment of RC in space  Solution: See the solution for culture issue above  Lack of Standards  Need to develop standard RC languages, tool flows, interfaces, libraries, and architectures.  What is the equivalent of an ISA (instruction set architecture) for an RC system?  Solution: Find a PhD candidate and convince them this is a worthwhile dissertation topic.  Solution: Develop an industry consortium to establish standards based on research and practical experience.

3. Ramos 3 /MAPLD 2005 Major Problems/Issues  Technical Problems/Issues  Lack of RC Devices  The market is lacking true RC device offerings.  FPGAs are a good start, but they are truly not RC devices. Rather they are the best thing engineers could find to implement RC systems.  Solution: Develop designs for RC devices that take advantage of RC research performed in the last 15 years.  Fault Tolerance  Available devices do not address fault tolerance  Effective fault tolerance design could solve problems with soft errors.  Natural Radiation Effects  Total Ionization Dose for available devices is sufficient for short duration missions. Higher TID needs will require microelectronics process changes.  SEEs are a major issue for COTS devices and current solutions consist of “patches” that increase system complexity and inefficiency.  Power and Efficiency  Power constraints in space applications demand high efficiency from microelectronics.  FPGAs are very inefficient with significant idle resources.  Floating Point  Available devices do not support floating point.  Most space applications either require or demand floating point algorithm implementation.  Packaging  Conflict between the need for high pin count devices and the reliability of those packages for space applications  Solution: Need to foster continued development of standardized components with high-speed serial interfaces -- RapidIO, etc.