Radiation-tolerant rugged FPGA for space applications like payload signal processing introduced by Xilinx

June 22, 2020
The XQRKU060 also offers high performance machine learning and machine learning development tools that support industry-standard frameworks.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Xilinx, Inc. in San Jose, Calif., is introducing a 20-nanometer space-grade field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for radiation-tolerant on-orbit applications in manned and unmanned spacecraft.

The rad-hard FPGA delivers ultra-high throughput and bandwidth performance for satellite and space applications. The radiation-tolerant Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060 FPGA provides unlimited on-orbit reconfiguration and a 10x increase in digital signal processing (DSP) performance.

The XQRKU060 also offers high performance machine learning and machine learning development tools that support industry-standard frameworks, including TensorFlow and PyTorch. These can enable neural network inference acceleration for real-time on-board processing in space.

The XQRKU060 provides 5.7 teraoperations per second of peak INT8 performance optimized for deep learning. The XQRKU060 provides customers with a space-resilient device equipped to handle short- and long-duration missions in harsh space environments.

Related: Radiation-tolerant FPGA for high-speed datapaths in spacecraft applications introduced by Microchip

The XQRKU060 provides real-time on-board processing and machine learning acceleration to enable satellites to update in real-time, deliver video-on-demand, and perform compute on-the-fly to process complex algorithms.

The machine learning capabilities are for scientific analysis, object detection, and image classification such as cloud detection. As applications change, the adaptive compute architecture of the XQRKU060 enables unlimited on-orbit reconfiguration for last-minute product updates prior to launch, as well as after it has been deployed in orbit.

The XQRKU060 has 2,760 UltraScale DSP slices and I/O bandwidth from 32 high-speed transceivers that can run as fast as 12.5 gigabits per second to deliver 400 gigabits per second aggregate bandwidth.

Related: Hermetic ceramic column grid array (CCGA) radiation-hardened SDRAM for space applications introduced by DDC

The XQRKU060 also features robust 40-40-millimeter ceramic packaging to withstand vibrations and handling during launch as well as radiation effects in harsh orbit environments. The architecture features a design for single event effects (SEE) mitigation to meet requirements for all orbits, including low-Earth orbit (LEO), medium-earth orbit (MEO), geosynchronous orbit (GEO), and deep space missions.

The XQRKU060 offers the Vivado Design Suite to help eliminate routing congestion. It enables designers to use more than 90 percent of the device without performance degradation.

For more information contact Xilinx online at www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/rt-kintex-ultrascale.html.

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