Self-repairing and tuning reconfigurable electronics for space

Space missions often require technologies not yet available for earth applications. This talk will present the development of self-reconfigurable electronics for two real-world problems met by NASA: extreme environment electronics and navigation grade miniaturized inertial measurement sensor. Radiation and extreme-temperature hardened electronics is needed to survive the harsh environments beyond earth´s atmosphere. Traditional approaches to preserve electronics incorporate radiation shielding, insulation and redundancy at the expense of power and weight. This presentation will demonstrate the implementation of a self-adaptive system using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and data converters which can autonomously recover the lost functionality of a reconfigurable analog array (RAA) integrated circuit (IC). The second application is related to the development of inexpensive, navigation grade, miniaturized inertial measurement unit (IMU), which surpasses the current state-of-the art in performance, compactness (both size and mass) and power efficiency used by all NASA missions. The talk will explain a self-tuning method for reconfigurable Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) gyroscopes based on evolutionary computation that has the capacity to efficiently increase the sensitivity of MEMS gyroscopes through in-situ tuning.