• SmallSat Electronics Ecosystem Expands with new Arm Cortex-based Reference Design

    Last week I attended the SmallSat symposium in Mountain View. This is the first of around half a dozen Small Satellite conferences that I’ll attend in 2018. That sounds like a lot of small satellite conferences, but there are actually many more that I…

  • Taking Steps to Ensure Security of Supply

    One of the reasons that the Arm architecture is so popular is that it addresses customers concerns about security of supply. In the event that an Arm-based chip is no longer available to buy, the legacy software that was developed for it can be ported…

  • Rad-hard Arm-Cortex MCU Increases Likelihood of CubeSat Success

    CubeSats are miniaturized satellites in a 10cm cube form-factor that are becoming enormously popular due to the benefits of standardization. The standards were originally driven by academia but have now been widely adopted for commercial and government…

  • No Protest from Arm Cortex-M0 MCU in Berkeley

    Last week we were pulling the nightshift in Cave 4B at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, using the 88-Inch Cyclotron facility to perform Heavy Ion Testing on the VA10820 Arm Cortex-M0 based microcontroller.

    Heavy Ion

    The cyclotron generated Boron, Neon, Argon…

  • Avoiding the Faults That Can Occur in our Stars

    It has long been common knowledge that particle strikes can flip bits in memory arrays and disrupt code execution. This is a common event in space, is somewhat common when travelling on aircraft and will occur to a lesser but measurable extent at sea…

  • Optimizing Power Consumption on Your Cortex-M0 Design

    Many of the engineers that are working on designs using the ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller care deeply about power consumption. This is particularly true for designers who use the VORAGO Technologies VA108x0, since it is a go-to choice for applications…