Speaker
Description
Most satellites use radiation-hardened microprocessors, as many organizations are concerned that a microprocessor failure could be catastrophic to the mission. Most radiation hardened microprocessors are not as capable as commercial microprocessors, and the instrument's performance might be affected by the microprocessor's capability. Commercial microprocessors can be useful for secondary, non-mission computations so that the radiation-hardened microprocessor has more capacity for mission critical processing. Qualifying a commercial microprocessor for space usage can be quite complicated, though. This talk will highlight methods for characterizing microprocessors for SEE failures, methods for mitigating microprocessors, and open questions regarding microprocessor resilience. The talk includes a short introduction to computer architecture for several
types of microprocessors.
