Speakers
Description
This presentation details our development of an actuator controller for new space launcher applications using the Microchip Polarfire FPGA. We showcase how adopting open-source hardware specifications and tooling—specifically the Wishbone bus infrastructure and AGWB interconnect generator—enabled us to limit vendor dependency while maintaining acceptable quality standards. A key technical achievement was our development of a cached controller for the Polarfire's internal NVM, creating a reliable non-volatile memory interface crucial for our application. Our bus-based architecture, combined with Polarfire's Identify ILA, provided good debugging observability during development. We demonstrate how this approach creates a pathway to extend our design to a complete system-on-chip using the RISC-V based Mi-V soft-core. This case study offers interesting insights for FPGA developers seeking to balance the new space industry's demands for faster, more economical development cycles while achieving acceptable reliability in radiation environments.
Affiliation of author(s)
Watt & Well
| Track | Industrial experience |
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