Title: Advanced Hybrid On-Board Science Data Processor - SpaceCube 2.0
Author: Tom Flatley
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Abstract:
Many of the missions proposed in the Earth Science Decadal Survey will require ìnext generationî on-board processing capabilities to meet their specified mission goals. The GSFC SpaceCube brings ìorder of magnitudeî improvements in on-board processing performance over current radiation hardened processors. Our research in 'radiation hardened by software' technology through our MISSE7 SpaceCube 1.0 experiment on the ISS has delivered extremely encouraging results and has demonstrated the promise of using the latest commercial Virtex FPGAs reliably in space. Our AIST-08 effort focuses on the design, build and test of a "SpaceCube Version 2.0" system based on a flexible combination of the new radiation hardened Virtex-5 parts and/or commercial Virtex-5 parts coupled with our 'radiation hardened by software' technology to deliver a true flight-worthy system that approaches the on-orbit performance of full radiation hardened systems, with a 10x to 100x improvement in processing capability, at a reduced cost.