There have been around 500 CubeSat-class satellites launched into orbit since 2000 and the forecast is that these super-cool miniature satellites will continue to be launched in increasing numbers.
CubeSats have their roots in academia, but are becoming increasingly more popular as a very efficient standardized platform for commercial space ventures.
Apart from the obvious awesomeness of launching a 10 x 10cm box of electronics into space and using it for a useful purpose, CubeSats are bringing down the costs of space exploration and opening up this frontier to thousands of engineers for all sorts of cool applications. Today, CubeSats are used for many things from science experiments to constellations of networked systems. The Internet of Space starts here.
Early CubeSats, particularly from the academic community, often used commercial off the shelf (COTS) components. This approach is changing, as specifications are becoming more demanding – they have to live longer, fly in more distant orbits and have to operate more reliably in radiation environments.
Since the VA10820 product launch in May 2016, there has been a steady stream of requests coming into the VORAGO website asking about the VA10820 rad-hard Cortex-M0. Finally, there is an affordable programmable device that can provide a radiation hardened anchor chip for any CubeSat budget. It has been picked up by designers for Command & Data Handling as well as a Watchdog to monitor, load and reset a more powerful (and expensive) FPGA for small sats that need more horsepower. For CubeSats with a limited budget, the combination of the rad-hard VA10820 MCU with a non-hard FPGA appears to be a device duo that is both robust and significantly lower cost than using only a rad-hard FPGA.
The ARM Cortex-M architecture has clearly been a major factor in the popularity of the VA10820 for CubeSats. The CubeSat generation of engineers have grown up expecting access to an ecosystem of development tools, support, ease-of-use and low power consumption that characterize the ARM Cortex-M experience. As an increasing number of CubeSat constellations are launched in orbit in the coming years, we’ll enjoy watching the Internet of Space enabled by the VA10820 rad-hard ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller.