"New Space" use cases permitted by Radiation Tolerant Space qualified Compute intensive processors, memories and modules solutions from Teledyne e2v

While seeking the highest amount of protection and reliability in Space (against harsh environments, radiations) has nailed down for a long time the computing performances of Space systems towards low levels versus commercially available devices, some recent use-cases would probably push this into the opposite direction, i.e. much higher amounts of computing capabilities with lower but decent tolerance to Space constraints. Therefore, New Space systems’ designers may think the specifications of their systems differently, with new compromises. Yesterday’s requirements for high protections / low CPU may be transformed into mitigating the protection levels for a disruptive amount of CPU. Teledyne e2v has chosen for long to offer radiation tolerant Gigahertz class compute intensive devices for Space payloads and platforms. Recently, the most powerful CPU for the Space market was introduced, a Quad ARM® Cortex®-A72 (30,000 DMIPS), as well as high-speed high density DDR4 memory (4GB - gigabytes). A substantial amount of radiation testing campaigns on these Teledyne e2v Space parts have allowed to characterize all of them against radiations, to provide reports, guidelines, mitigation schemes to their users. Those characterizations against radiation effects are perfectly complementing the inherent Space quality level and robustness of Teledyne e2v parts (QML-Y or ECSS/NASA grades). This paper presents the radiation testing techniques, results and qualification levels of Teledyne e2v’s high capability compute intensive components. Results on LS1046-Space (Radiation Tolerant Quad ARM Cortex-A72), DDR4T04G72 (Radiation Tolerant high speed compact 4GB DDR4), and Qormino® QLS1046-4GB-Space (compact computing module embedding LS1046-Space & DDR4T04G72 components) will be presented. These results highlight that latest campaigns on TID and SEE (SEU, SEFIs) performed by Teledyne e2v allow any designer of Space systems to consider those devices. In order to better understand the level of computing capabilities from Teledyne e2v components, and how their usage allow to contemplate very modern use cases for Space, this paper also presents example of applications that can be considered with such components. A specific focus, is made on the preliminary results obtained on a project aiming at using Qormino for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Earth observation applications. In particular, benchmark activities were performed to evaluate the Qormino performance on classical neural networks, and compare it with standard components. Some extracts of this benchmark study are presented, in order to outlook what the new space applications may foresee and benefit from safe Space qualified compute intensive parts