SBIR-STTR Award

AeroAstro's innovative design approach for implementing reconfigurable electronics frees the spacecraft designer to concentrate on the mission at hand with significant assurance that single-point failures can be automatically corrected. It also uses dynamic reconfiguration to change circuit functions which will create the opportunity to conserve mass, volume, and power while providing capabilities that may have been valuable, but deemed to be less important or infrequently needed so that they could not justify dedicated hardware. The system operates at a much finer level of granularity than with other reconfigurable approaches, which increases not the only adaptability and versatility, but also reduces the redundancy required to assure the success of the mission. Unlike traditional approaches that employ redundant systems, there are no mass penalties, and affordability is achievable. Significant benefits include dramatic orders of magnitude reduction in mass, volume, and cost.

Potential NASA Commercial Applications:
(LIMIT 150 WORDS) Reconfigurability benefits all missions by providing graceful degradation of electronic systems after damage, and also enabling additional functionality. The improved safety achieved is essential to success. Failures result in loss of experiments, the mission, and even the astronauts' lives. Delays in restoring failed equipment to at least minimal functionality are intolerable. The demands of interplanetary travel are more difficult, beginning with Mars exploration missions, much longer in duration, thus increasing the likelihood of failure. There will be powerful contention over the allocation of resources. Compromises reducing spare parts are inevitable. Self-diagnosing, self-repairing systems enhance the success of these bold ventures.

Potential NON-NASA Commercial Applications:
(LIMIT 150 WORDS) Military systems, to destroy sensitive equipment if capture is imminent, to cloak equipment by stealth or to enable graceful degradation after battle damage. Electronic systems not used simultaneously can be combined into a single reconfigurable system. The aircraft industry. Critical system failure might cost hundreds of souls. Other transportation systems, including automotive, trucks, railroads, and ships. Power plants, electrical transmission/distribution systems, financial networks, homeland security-related systems. Medical systems, vital in operating rooms and other areas of hospitals, and personal electronic systems that sustain life benefit from increased reliability. NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

Technology Taxonomy Mapping:
Architectures and Networks Attitude Determination and Control Autonomous Control and Monitoring Computer System Architectures Data Acquisition and End-to-End-Management Data Input/Output Devices Guidance, Navigation, and Control Highly-Reconfigurable Manned-Manuvering Units On-Board Computing and Data Management Pilot Support Systems Portable Life Support Power Management and Distribution RF Radiation-Hard/Resistant Electronics Suits Telemetry, Tracking and Control Tools Ultra-High Density/Low Power

Modern electronic systems tolerate only as many point failures as there are redundant system copies, using mere macro-scale redundancy. Fault Tolerant Electronics Supporting Space Exploration (FTESSE) creates an electronic design paradigm using reprogrammable FPGAs to create swappable Circuit Object Blocks (COBs) ? analogous to software objects ? for the first time enabling redundancy on a micro-scale. The result is an increased tolerance of point failures by several orders of magnitude over traditional approaches. In the FTESSE approach, FPGAs are partitioned into COBs (groups of gates), each performing a specific function. Bad areas can be mapped like the bad sector data on a disk drive, enabling COBs to be placed in areas of working gates to recover system performance. Hardware tested during Phase I verified point failures could be introduced into an example circuit and corrected. As in the Phase I model, circuits to be monitored reside on a Slave FPGA, and a Master FPGA monitors outputs of all COBs, sensing faults and mapping non-working gates on the Slave FPGA. The Master is a rad-hard, triple mode redundancy (TMR) FPGA, but the Slaves need not be, opening the doors to higher performance applications while maintaining high levels of fault tolerance.

Potential NASA Commercial Applications:
(Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words) Reconfigurability will benefit all missions by providing orders of magnitude more tolerance of point failures in electronic systems, including graceful degradation of electronic systems upon further unexpected damage (e.g., that incurred at launch, those from micrometeorite impacts or high-radiation environments, etc). Examples of electronic systems benefiting from this design approach are radios, flight computers, and other systems demanding the highest reliability. The requirements of moon-base missions and interplanetary travel ? beginning with the Mars exploration missions ? are daunting. Not only are these much longer in duration, thus increasing the likelihood of failure because of operational time alone, there will also be powerful contention over the allocation of resources and inevitable compromises that reduce the availability of spare parts. A self-diagnosing, self-repairing system will go far in insuring the success of these bold ventures.



Potential NON-NASA Commercial Applications:
:
(Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words) Current Military systems use various devices to destroy or damage sensitive or valuable equipment if capture is imminent. Another approach would be to use stealth via reconfigurability, effectively cloaking the hardware by reconfiguring it to perform an entirely different function than its military application. Imagine a military radio that, if captured, would simply generate random tones! Other systems benefiting include today's aircraft, which depend on high-reliability fly-by-wire systems. Critical infrastructure systems such as power plants, electrical transmission and distribution systems, financial networks and homeland security-related systems depend on 100% availability of electronic systems. Life support electronics systems are vital in our hospitals' operating rooms. Inaccessible systems, difficult to reach to perform service, may have financial motives to adopt a reliable system; and in case of failures, they can report so that repairs to a diminished but still functional system can be scheduled for repair at the most convenient time. NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

Technology Taxonomy Mapping:
Attitude Determination and Control Guidance, Navigation, and Control Highly-Reconfigurable On-Board Computing and Data Management Radiation-Hard/Resistant Electronics Suits