NASA GSFC Development of the SpaceCube MINI

NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center is developing a radiation tolerant miniaturized space processor for use in a multitude of different space flight applications, from free flyers through embedded computing nodes. The Goddard design is building off of our expertise in the hardware/software design of the legacy SpaceCube 1 that flew on the Hubble Servicing Mission and the ISS MISSE7 experiment. The new design will physically conform to the volume requirements of a standard 1U (10cm x 10cm x 10cm) Cubesat. It will incorporate the Xilinx Virtex-5, the latest in high speed, high density, and with the SIRF variant, radiation tolerant FPGA design. Built in peripherals will include 512Mx16 of SDRAM, 96 gigabits of FLASH memory, a radiation hard Aeroflex FPGA (as a watchdog, configuration manager, and scrubber), a 12 bit analog to digital converter, and local power regulation. External interfaces are varied and plentiful with 2 SATA interfaces, 1 Xilinx MGT Interface, 4 Spacewire or 8 LVDS interfaces, 8 RS422 interfaces, and a handful of analog / single ended I/O. Power consumption will range from 5 to 15 watts. The GSFC SpaceCube MINI design even includes one expansion slot to add in an optional user I/O card. With this capability the end user can add in mission unique interfaces without having to resort to using another physical enclosure. The SpaceCube MINI has been designed to use either the radiation tolerant SIRF part from Xilinx, or a regular commercial Xilinx V5. This allows for varied mission requirements to be covered where either computing power and cost or radiation performance can be optimized using the same SpaceCube MINI design. Finally the SpaceCube MINI is designed to allow multiple SpaceCube MINI’s to be daisy chained together, through Gigabit interfaces, enabling it to form an extremely powerful distributed computing node