Last week I was at the SmallSat symposium in Silicon Valley. The attendance for this conference has quadrupled since last year, highlighting the growth of interest in small satellite activity.
Large satellites are expensive and use very expensive components; many tens of thousands of dollars for a rad-hard-by-design processor. SmallSats are still expensive (don’t expect much change from $1M) but the budget is usually difficult to stretch to using rad-hard components.
There was a lot of discussion in the workshops about ‘up-screening’. This is the practice of taking a batch of ‘commercial off-the-shelf’ (COTS) components and attempting to find process outliers that appear to work beyond the specification that they were designed for. Yes, it sounds a bit risky and yes, it is risky. It can be expensive to up-screen too.
I was delighted at the response to VORAGO rad-hard ARM Cortex-M0 microcontrollers. These devices have been manufactured using a radiation-hardening CMOS-based process, so are a cost-effective alternative to up-screened devices - without the risk.
The VORAGO VA10820 rad-hard ARM MCU is used in many SmallSat designs, both as a standalone ‘flight controller’ and as a watchdog to ‘look after’ lesser-hardened devices that require to be monitored (and reset in the event of a radiation-induced failure).
Many nimble start-up companies are joining the space race with SmallSats. These engineers are moving fast and want to use state-of-the-art components that have an established ecosystem and are easy to design with. This requirement, along with the fact that SmallSats are powered by solar cells and need low power processing, have positioned the rad-hard VORAGO ARM-based microcontroller as a key enabler for SmallSat success.