Washington, Aug 19 (IANS) NASA has chosen US-based Microchip Technology to develop a high-performance area flight computing (HPSC) processor that may present at the least 100 occasions the computational capability of present spaceflight computer systems.
The next-generation processor would advance all sorts of future area missions, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars floor missions.
“This cutting-edge spaceflight processor can have an amazing influence on our future area missions and even applied sciences right here on Earth,” mentioned Niki Werkheiser, director of know-how maturation inside the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a press release.
“This effort will amplify current spacecraft capabilities and allow new ones and will finally be utilized by just about each future area mission, all benefiting from extra succesful flight computing,” Werkheiser added.
Microchip will architect, design, and ship the HPSC processor over three years, with the aim of using the processor on future lunar and planetary exploration missions.
Microchip’s processor structure will considerably enhance the general computing effectivity for these missions by enabling computing energy to be scalable, primarily based on mission wants. The design additionally will probably be extra dependable and have a better fault tolerance.
As a part of NASA’s ongoing business partnership efforts, the work will happen beneath a $50 million firm-fixed-price contract, with Microchip contributing vital analysis and growth prices to finish the mission.
“We are happy that NASA chosen Microchip as its accomplice to develop the next-generation space-qualified compute processor platform,” mentioned Babak Samimi, company vp for Microchip’s Communications enterprise unit.
The platform “will ship complete Ethernet networking, superior synthetic intelligence/machine studying processing and connectivity assist whereas providing unprecedented efficiency acquire, fault-tolerance, and safety structure at low energy consumption”, Samimi added.
Microchip’s HPSC processor can also be helpful to different authorities companies and relevant to different sorts of future area missions to discover our photo voltaic system and past, from Earth science operations to Mars exploration and human lunar missions.
The processor might doubtlessly be used for business programs on Earth that require related mission important edge computing wants as area missions and are in a position to safely proceed operations if one element of the system fails.
These potential purposes embody industrial automation, edge computing, time-sensitive ethernet information transmission, synthetic intelligence, and even Internet of Things gateways, which bridge numerous communication applied sciences.
(Except for the headline, the remainder of this IANS article is un-edited)
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