SAN DIEGO, Calif., 7 August 2006. Space Micro has announced that its Proton200k Computer is part of the solution that has been selected by the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate, located at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., for engineering design and development support for the Autonomous Nanosatellite Guardian Evaluating Local Space (ANGELS) satellite program.
The award is for the ANGELS Phase 3 Option effort from Preliminary Design Review (PDR) through Critical Design Review (CDR), August 2006 through August 2007. Following completion of the CDR, the Air Force will pursue a follow-on contract for production of a protoflight unit.
Space Micro is part of the team led by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company (LMSSC) that also includes Space Dynamics Laboratory, a division of the Utah State University Research Foundation of Logan, Utah; the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Solutions (LMIS&S), Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
"Our approach to the ANGELS program has been to select the best components and teaming partners to assure Mission Success," said Stanley O. Kennedy, Jr., Senior Manager - Surveillance and Navigation Programs at LMSSC. "Space Micro's combination of experience in radiation-hardened electronic solutions, and the performance of their Proton200k computing platform, have proven to be valuable assets which are ensuring our team to continue to perform on this program."
Based upon a 6700-class digital signal processor from Texas Instruments, the Proton200k computer is capable of 900 MFLOPS (million floating-point operations per second) performance at a Single Event Upset (SEU) rate of 1E-4 unrecoverable errors/day using only 5-7 Watts of power.
The Proton200k also has a total dose tolerance of greater than 100 krad (Si). Protection from SEUs is achieved using Space Micro's patent-pending Time-Triple Modular Redundancy (TTMR) approach, while Single Event Functional Interrupts (SEFIs) are mitigated using the patent-pending H-Core (Hardened Core) technology.
