CPU Tech has won a contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque to develop a practical method for adapting commercial processor designs for use in radiation environments. Over the next twelve months, CPU Tech will develop RadFire, a high-assurance, rad-hard equivalent of Motorola’s ColdFire processor.
Processors used in space systems such as satellites, payloads and launch vehicles must be radiation-hardened, very reliable and available for the long term.
If they could also be compatible with commercial grade processors, space system developers could save a great deal of time and money. They could use commercially available standard software tools such as programming language compilers, run-time operating systems and the like, rather than custom software.
One of the major problems with commercial processors, however, is that they quickly become obsolete, and therefore unavailable, as new technology is developed.
So a practical solution has to include the ability for virtually any foundry to manufacture the processor even in the future when the manufacturing processes may have changed. It also has to include a plan to ensure the availability of the intellectual property far into the future.
CPU Tech’s RadFire will be a high-assurance processor, optimized for use in radiation environments, that will be the exact functional equivalent of the ColdFire.
It will not become obsolete because its design will be “foundry process independent.” This means that the design netlist can be moved between foundries without any design changes required. Life-cycle support will be guaranteed.
What makes CPU Tech think they can succeed where others have failed? Over the past ten years, CPU Tech has invested countless man hours and millions of dollars in a unique automated validation technology that makes it possible for them to provide very high assurance that a processor or a circuit board or an entire system is precisely compatible with another processor, board or system.
It is this same design technique that makes it possible for CPU Tech to guarantee its customers binary compatibility and life-cycle support for its ReNewplug-and-play system-on-a-chip solutions.
ReNew enables Validated Modernization of mission critical electronics for increased reliability, safety and performance. It provides low-risk, cost-effective solutions to the problems of high failure rates, high maintenance costs and limited performance for high-end embedded systems such as those used in avionics and other aerospace systems.
CPU Tech has numerous patents in the areas of system and processor design and complex system modeling. Its microprocessor development technologies, including configurable processor frameworks, automated compatibility testing and system virtual prototyping, make it possible to provide efficient, affordable and reliable long-term compatible solutions.
