Processors manufactured with tailored silicon-on-insulator
technology can withstand the high levels of radiation in space.
Growing interest in space exploration has increased the demand
for vehicles that can achieve high computational speed using minimal power.
Here, we describe a new, 1.5cm-wide thin silicon processor that combines these
attributes.
The chip, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and
Japan's Institute of Space Astronautical Science, comprises a 32-bit processor
with a floating-point unit (for numerical operations), and an interface
configured for the spacecraft communications network SpaceWire. It achieves a
computational speed of 100 mega-instructions per second (MIPS), using less than
1W. The chip is tough, constructed from a commercial hardened
silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate, which ensures reliability but is also
more affordable than some of the specialized SOI materials used in other space
chips.