CHATSWORTH, Calif., 8 Dec. 2010. Aitech Defense Systems Inc. in chatsworth, Calif., is introducing the rugged S750 radiation-tolerant Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet switch PCI mezzanine card (PMC) for harsh-environment spacecraft applications, including low earth orbit (LEO), Mars terrestrial, and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO).
The switch fabric interface card transfers Ethernet data between Gigabit Ethernet NIC end-points and the host central processor. On-board memory and function redundancy on the S750 is implemented in a radiation-hardened field-programmabe gate array (FPGA) to operate in harsh space environments. The card has as many as four 100/1000BaseT, full duplex Ethernet ports and one emulated virtual network port for network access to the single board computer network stack via the local PCI bus. 1000Base-X is available as an option.
The rad-hard PMC operates on Aitech's PowerPC-based 3U CompactPCI S950 single-board computer, so the user can initiate managed switch functions such as, statically and dynamically configurable Gigabit Ethernet packet transfers, port management, and several power-saving options. The card has a triple-modular-redundancy FPGA architecture, and delivers on-board Flash and SDRAM memory redundancy for low latency Ethernet transfers and data integrity.
The minimum unshielded total ionizing dose (TID) of the PMC is more than 10 krad (Si), with higher radiation hardness levels available. The card runs on less than eight Watts of power. The S750 PMC has an eight-megabyte, no-overhead, direct memory addressable buffer allocated in the single-board computer SDRAM with a real-time, no wait-state triple voting algorithm.
For more information contact Aitech online at www.rugged.com.
