Description: The accelerator developed by Niobium Microsystems, Inc. (Niobium) is scalable in terms of parallelism and memory capacity, so that it can be targeted towards a variety of platforms, from small battery operated devices to large high-performance compute systems. It also has the ability to perform online learning when operating on neuromorphic workloads, drawing inspiration from the Hebbian learning paradigm. Additionally, the accelerator is designed as a memory-mapped peripheral of a larger heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) and as such it can utilize external memory and implement arbitrarily sized Neural Networks (NNs) and even multiple NNs at the same time. Niobium is also prototyping several different approaches for incorporating radiation-tolerant features in the core by leveraging Niobium’s novel digital circuit design flow, and incorporating magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) where appropriate to harden the memory. As part of the Phase II effort, Niobium proposes to proceed with the implementation of the accelerator core with two additional innovations that are crucial to the NASA mission, but also have broader market potential in commercial and defense applications. Specifically, we plan to utilize Niobium’s asynchronous circuit design techniques to (1) enable broad Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) for enhanced protection against long-term radiation effects as well as potential improvements in energy efficiency, and (2) incorporate low-overhead radiation-tolerant circuits that protect against transient radiation effects, commonly referred to as Single-Event Transients (SETs), while minimizing the overhead in terms of power, performance and area. Lastly, as part of the implementation effort, Niobium intends to perform a quantitative tradeoff analysis between MRAM and conventional ECC-protected static random access memory (SRAM) with redundancy for the system-level cache of the accelerator.

Benefits: NASA’s missions will establish a permanent presence on the moon this decade (Artemis), followed by similar efforts on Mars. The remote deployment, with long communication latency and limited bandwidth, requires more autonomous systems that can sense their environment, react accordingly and adapt over time. The Niobium chip will enable such capabilities AND allow for withstanding the radiation effects present in space.

These demonstrable capabilities are directly transferable to space systems, autonomous vehicles, and other sensor platforms. Niobium is engaging with DoD customers regarding this effort: AFRL/RV, AFRL/RYA, AFRL/RI. Additionally the growing commercial space market is seeking to establish a permanent presence in space which will require rad-tolerant features, not COTS hardware used by LEO solutions.