US 12,681,889 B1 · Multipurpose processor card

Abstract

The present invention is a multipurpose microprocessor card for use as the central processing unit for the Command and Data Handling of spacecraft (C&DH), instrument and payload (IC&DH), as well as any custom instrument controller. The processor card utilizes a state-of-the-art, radiation hardened processor (e.g., Aeroflex Gaisler GR70 Quad-Core LEON4 SPARC V8 250 Mhz processor) and supports SpaceWire, technical standard balanced voltage digital interface circuit (e.g., RS-422), and MIL-1553B protocols to communicate with other critical cards and instruments throughout the spacecraft bus. The present invention takes advantage of the fast communication between the processor and a space-qualified radiation-hardened field-programmable gate array (FPGA), to involve high-speed peripherals controlled by the FPGA and accessible by the processor. The present invention has a dedicated port to provide its analog telemetry to be monitored by other cards and can generate a power cycle by a communication board or any other entity capable of monitoring same.

Claims19

Dependent claims

A processor board comprising:

a processor;
and
a field-programmable gate array (FPGA);
wherein the processor is connected to the FPGA through a peripheral component interconnect (PCI) interface, which connects a first PCI core on the processor to a second PCI core on the FPGA;
wherein the processor is a radiation-hard system-on-chip featuring a quad-core fault-tolerant processor, and which supports a first multi-port SpaceWire router and a plurality of first SpaceWires;
wherein the FPGA has a radiation-hard configuration and includes nonvolatile re-programmable flash technology, and single-event upset (SEU) hardened registers;
and
wherein the FPGA supports a second multi-port SpaceWire router and a plurality of second SpaceWires that exceeds a number of the plurality of the first SpaceWires.

5 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Multipurpose processor card

Life of this patent

Multipurpose processor card

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims19