Reconfigurable FPGAs Designed for Satellite Program Published Sept. 21, 2009 By Eva Blaylock Space Vehicles KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, New Mexico -- A Cooperative Research and Development Agreement enabled collaboration between Air Force Research Laboratory and Xilinx Corporation is developing a space-hardened version of the company's latest field-programmable gate array product: the Single-Event-Upset Immune Reconfigurable FPGA, or SIRF. Now under proposal for a military satellite program as an alternative to custom chips, SIRF would save $100 million and a year of schedule--benefits that go beyond the reduction of nonrecurring engineering to encompass the entire schedule and risk equation. With SIRF, satellites exposed to space radiation can leverage the latest, most cost-effective commercial electronics technology available today. FPGAs are arrays of processing and memory elements that can be electrically configured in the field to perform the same complex functions as microprocessors and custom integrated circuits. For low-volume users in the satellite industry, FPGAs are much more affordable and save months of schedule compared to custom solutions. These advantages make FPGAs attractive enough to use in space despite their sensitivity to the space radiation environment, a quality that has generally constrained their usage to a complex, triple-redundant form. To make SIRF insensitive to space radiation, engineers will redesign the technology using Radiation Hardening by Design, an AFRL-pioneered approach entailing various transistor and circuit modifications. The $30 million RHBD program has already produced an engineering prototype demonstrating the effectiveness of RHBD techniques in one of the most complex chips ever produced. A production version, planned for late 2009, is expected to replace as many as half of the custom chips now used in satellites, for a total dollar savings well into the hundreds of millions.