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…

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…

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…

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 PCBs, high temperature solder and sourcing components…

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.

The cyclotron generated Boron, Neon, Argon…

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…

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 at 200˚C and there is a now a willingness from some…

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…

It was a thrill for us that a VORAGO Technologies ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller was part of the payload that was rocketed to the International Space Station on the SpaceX Falcon 9 this week.

Space electronics technology has not kept up the pace of innovation…

Today, the SpaceX CRS-10 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) blasted off containing a critical piece of experimental electronics. Why is this big news? Because the experiment is controlled by an Arm-based VORAGO Technologies…

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;…