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Comment by haunter

6 hours ago

And if you are curious about the modern radiation hardened CPUs then the current state of the art ones are the MOOG BRE440 [0] and the BAE RAD5500 [1], 5545 [2] being the highest performance multi core one.

Even more interesting that they both use the IBM POWER architecture!

0, https://www.moog.com/products/avionics/spacecraft-avionics/b...

1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500

2, https://web.archive.org/web/20190226111129/https://www.baesy...

There have been a number of rad-hard SPARC chips from different vendors tthat have flown along the way, and I know Frontgrade/Gaisler currently sells a SPARC v8 version, which isn't that far behind the 'state of the art' as the e5500 based PPCs from BEA (at least as far as state of the art in space rated, rad-hard processors goes...it's a conservative market). Quite a few rad-hard ARMs out there farther down the performance curve.

Frontgrade also advertises a rad-hard RISC-V, as does Microchip (a PIC64 variant), that I know nothing about, but seems like an inevitable next step. Seems like you could grab some Xilinx rad-hard FPGA and bobs your uncle.

what scale of radiation do such hardened designs target?

  • 1 Megarad (10 Kilogray)

    In comparison radtherapy patients get 20 gray in 1-2 weeks so it's the 20/10000 = 0.02% of what these designs target

Wow, until you posted this I thought Moog was just a synthesizer company. And a bit of an odd one at that based on how I saw that synth presented.