Quad-core radiation-hardened system-on-chip power architecture processor

Abstract

Based on the QorlQ ® system-on-chip processor architecture from Freescale Semiconductor with additional unique features for space applications, the RAD55xX™ system on-chip platform integrated circuit can be personalized into multiple processor solutions. The RAD55xx platform includes four 32/64 bit Power Architecture ® processor cores, three levels of on-die cache memory, dual interleaved DDR3 DRAM controllers, data path acceleration architecture (DPAA) on-die hardware accelerators, a NAND Flash controller, and high I/O throughput based on serializer/deserializer high speed links. Manufactured at the IBM trusted foundry in 45nm silicon-on insulator (SOl) process technology with copper interconnect and leveraging the radiation-hardened by design RH45™ technology, the RAD55xx platform optimizes power/performance to deliver processor throughput of up to 5.6 GOPS/3.7 GFLOPS, memory bandwidth of up to 102 Gb/s, and I/O throughput of up to 64 Gb/s. Each of the highly efficient RAD5500™ 64-bit cores offers direct addressability to 64 GB of memory, improves double precision floating point performance, and achieves 3.0 Dhrystone MIPS/MHz. The RAD55xx platform is designed for insertion into systems using the SpaceVPX standard, supporting the RapidlO data plane, SpaceWire control plane, and 12C utility plane. Architectural trades, the development methodology, technical challenges, and single board computer solutions are discussed.

On-Demand Redundancy Grouping: Selectable Soft-Error Tolerance for a Multicore Cluster

“…As reliable processing is an important requirement for critical missions in space, several commercial processors that focus specifically on radiation tolerance have been developed. These radiation-hardened processors, such as the RAD line of processors [8], [9] implementing the PowerPC Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) or the LEON line of processors [10]- [12] implementing the SPARC ISA, are designed using radiationhardened processes. This means the processors leverage characteristics of the fabrication and cell design that increase tolerance to SEUs.…”

Comparative Analysis of Present and Future Space-Grade Processors with Device Metrics

“…III, Fig. 1 provides the CD, CD/W, IMB, EMB, and IOB for various existing and emerging space-grade processors in logarithmic scale, including the Honeywell HXRHPPC™ [28] and BAE Systems RAD750 ® [29], which are single-core CPUs; the Cobham GR712RC™ [30,31], Cobham GR740™ [32][33][34], and BAE Systems RAD5545™ [35], which are multicore CPUs; the Boeing Maestro™ [36][37][38], which is a many-core CPU; the Ramon Chips RC64™ [39][40][41][42][43] and BAE Systems RADSPEED™ [44,45], which are multicore DSPs; and the Xilinx Virtex-5QV FX130 [25-27,46] and Microsemi RTG4™ [47][48][49][50], which are FPGAs. Data from Fig.…”

Standardized SpaceWire solutions for next generation systems

“…The RAD55xx™ family of processors [15] feature from one to four 1.3 GOP CPU cores supported by four RapidIO ports of four 5 Gbaud lanes, sixteen SpaceWire links with a router, four I2C interfaces, two DDR3 ports and a host of other System on a chip (SOC) functions and interfaces.…”