Ross Bannatyne

One of the major attractions of adopting the Arm Cortex-M architecture is the healthy ecosystem of hardware and software development tools that support all Arm-based products. Most engineers prefer to…

The sources of interest in the VORAGO Technologies HT-DAB-1 high temperature data acquisition evaluation and reference design kit has surprised me a bit.

Space is sexy again for the first time in a generation. The demand to get SmallSats in space is very high and the number that will be put into orbit is constrained by the limited launch capacity.

One of the reasons that the Arm architecture is so popular is that it addresses customers concerns about security of supply.

CubeSats are miniaturized satellites in a 10cm cube form-factor that are becoming enormously popular due to the benefits of standardization.

Designing an electronics control board that will operate at 200˚C is not trivial. There are all sorts of considerations that don’t apply to commercial electronics systems such as high temperature capable…

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…

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…

Electronics packaging technology has moved on a bit since that classic line about ‘plastics’ was delivered in The Graduate movie, 50 years ago. Plastic packages are now capable of operating comfortably…

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…

Space electronics technology has not kept up the pace of innovation that we have seen in recent years in commercial products such as consumer handsets.

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…

The ARM Cortex-M0 based VA10800 microcontroller has been qualified and is rated for operation at 200˚C.

This week, we’ve been enjoying the temperate climate in Lowell, MA, while our ARM Cortex-M0 microcontrollers have been weathering a storm of radiation in the ‘Gamma Cave’ at UMass.

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…

A few weeks ago VORAGO Technologies issued a press release to announce that our VA10800 microcontroller had just surpassed 4000 hours of successful operation at 200C.

Space radiation can cause different types of problems in an IC that are manifested as latch-up or Single Event Upsets (SEU). Latch-up can be immunized against by hardening the chip with a process enhancement…

The VA10820 microcontroller was created to give designers a guaranteed rad-hard ARM Cortex-M0 that will operate reliably in space, at a fraction of the cost of an old-school space market FPGA.