Description: Innoflight will develop a new family of radiation hardened (up to 3 Mrad(Si)), fault-tolerant, high data-rate (up to 8 Gbps), low power Gigabit Ethernet PHY and Switch chips to meet a critical need in the space industry. Modern spacecraft payloads demand high throughput while maintaining extremely high levels of reliability and fault tolerance. Currently, no standardized protocols presently offer space-level products that provide gigabit-class throughputs. One-off protocols have many drawbacks including long development times, high potential for error, a lack of existing materials, and do not lend themselves to easy prototyping since COTS products are unavailable. These chips will retain the power of using the Ethernet standard but will be extended in an innovative way that will allow data rates up to 8 Gbps per port but will still be compatible with ground hardware for development purposes. Through automated fault monitoring the PHY chip will be automatically detect link failures and the only adverse effect will be a reduction in throughput.

Benefits: The radiation hardened Ethernet Ethernet PHY and switch fabric will be applicable not only to NASA spacecraft, but to all spacecraft applications. Department of Defense and commercial satellites have high data rate needs but demand the utmost in reliability and hardness which this chipset will provide. Operationally responsive space missions need to maintain a pool of components with standard interfaces to aid in rapid integration. Low-cost missions cannot afford the long development time, and thus high cost, required by custom protocols. Beyond spacecraft, this technology also has potential applications in scientific and industrial facilities like particle accelerators and power plants.

The radiation hardened Ethernet PHY and switch fabric that is developed for this project will be suitable for use within many NASA spacecraft components. The resulting chips combine many desirable traits including high data rates, high reliability, excellent TID performance, and low power. Because of this, they will be suitable for use in components that are developed for a range of spacecraft sizes and applications. Many scientific missions generate large quantities of data that must be stored or processed for later downlinking. But since no space hardware presently exists using standard protocols with this level of capability missions are forced to resort to custom interfaces.