By John McHale
NANTES, France-Engineers at Temic Semiconductors in Nantes, France, claim to have designed the first digital signal processor (DSP) for space applications. The device is a version of the Analog Devices 21020 DSP.
Temic customers are purchasing the new device for telecommunications satellite programs, but company officials decline comment on any possible contracts.
Temic officials, working with officials at the European Space Agency, radiation-hardened the TSC21020E with a 100 kilorad total-dose tolerance, says Patrice Hamard manager of avionics, military, and space marketing at Temic. The device is latch-up immune and resistant to single event upsets, but specific data is not yet available, he says.
The TSC21020E is manufactured with a .6-micron radiation-tolerant CMOS process.
Temic`s TSC21020E 32-bit floating-point DSP offers increased integration and programmability over its competitors in satellite on-board data processing, Temic officials claim.
The space DSP is pin and code compatible with the commercial Analog Devices ADSP-21020 device, thereby benefiting from existing development tools and algorithms, making system development and prototyping straightforward and cost-effective, Temic officials say.
"With the TSC21020E, Temic offers new capabilities to satellite equipment manufacturers such as data processing for advanced image compression, instrument control or configurable on-board processors," says Amar Guennoun, aerospace director at Temic.
The 40 million floating point operations per second TSC21020E is available with a 20 MHz speed specification, either in a 223-pin ceramic PGA for fast prototyping or in a 256-pin multilayer QFP for flight models.
Temic engineers are radiation hardening the Analog Devices 21020 DSP for space use.
