FPGAs offer significant benefits as coprocessors. They have already found a niche in high-end comms, military, aerospace, imaging and intelligence apps.
By facilitating the development of modular, well-partitioned systems, a microkernel architecture can make coding errors easier to detect, isolate and repair.
Test and Screening Designing for Radiation Tolerance
Although popular in civilian systems, SRAM-based FPGAs are hampered by SEU in space, airborne and terrestrial radiation environments. There are alternatives.
Design Commercial, Fly Rad-Hard Gary Kirchner, Director of Engineering and Technology, Defense & Space Electronic Systems, Honeywell
Space-based systems are getting more sophisticated and must rely on increasingly complex integrated circuits to achieve technical goals. The only way to accomplish this is to leverage from, and partner with COTS IC companies.
Fibre Channel has become entrenched as a popular technology for low-latency, high-bandwidth data movement. Widespread adoption in the enterprise SAN market ensures that Fibre Channel will be around for the long haul.
As soon as a top-level structure is defined, all of the system parts can be “stubbed out” and the architecture can be tested against its specification. Since UML model-driven testing makes automatic stub generation easy, systems can now be debugged very early on.
