B&A Engineering: Deep Space Instrumentation

Key Documents

Aerospace & Defense Brochure

Xilinx FPGAs prove able to endure, operate, and survive cryogenic temperatures.

Current and future NASA robotic-flight missions to outer planets and asteroids require avionics systems, computers, controllers and data-processing units capable of enduring the extreme low-temperature environments of deep space and lunar and Martian surfaces.

With recent technological advances in FPGAs, it has become possible to architect a complete system-on-a-chip (SoC) using a single FPGA.

B&A Engineering (BAENG) conducted studies with a Xilinx mixed-signal radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) FPGA to address NASA’s need for protected, reliable data-acquisition controllers and computer electronics able to operate in cryogenic temperatures.

This RHBD FPGA will be the workhorse of future NASA computer and data-handling systems targeted for outer-planet landing, orbiting and sample-retrieval missions… What’s remarkable is that we found that the chip works at temperatures well below spec for a commercial part and even well below spec for a space-grade Xilinx FPGA.

- Alireza Bakhshi, Principal, B&A Engineering Systems Inc.