AeroAstro Wins Contract to Develop Self-Repairing FPGAs

April 16, 2007 - Space News

Ashburn, Va.-based AeroAstro Inc. has won a two-year, $600,000 contract through the NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to develop self-repairing hardware for spacecraft data communications systems, the company said in an April 10 press release.

AeroAstro, a small satellite and satellite technology provider, is using what it calls Fault Tolerant Electronics Supporting Space Exploration to create redundancy on a circuit-level scale using computer chips called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). AeroAstro has developed a way to partition FPGAs into groups capable of reconfiguring themselves to restore system performance if other FPGAs experience problems, according to AeroAstro's 2005 SBIR proposal about the technology.

The technique applies a level of redundancy seen in software to a hardware scale, according to the release.

Fault-Tolerant Electronics Supporting Space Exploration is expected "to provide rugged electronic platforms with the capability not to just recover from a single fault, but to reconfigure themselves to literally work around multiple faults," Bill Seng, AeroAstro's chief technology officer, said in a prepared statement. "This is critical technology for long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars, where repair facilities are few and far between.

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Contact:
Kim Irving
Director of Marketing
AeroAstro, Inc.
703.554.6335