Quad-core radiation-hardened system-on-chip power architecture processor

Based on the QorIQ^® system-on-chip processor architecture from Freescale Semiconductor with additional unique features for space applications, the RAD55xx^TM system-on-chip platform integrated circuit can be personalized into multiple processor solutions. The RAD55xx platform includes four 32/64 bit Power Architecture^® processor cores, three levels of on-die cache memory, dual interleaved DDR3 DRAM controllers, data path acceleration architecture (DPAA) on-die hardware accelerators, a NAND Flash controller, and high I/O throughput based on serializer/deserializer high speed links. Manufactured at the IBM trusted foundry in 45nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process technology with copper interconnect and leveraging the radiation-hardened by design RH45^TM technology, the RAD55xx platform optimizes power/performance to deliver processor throughput of up to 5.6 GOPS/3.7 GFLOPS, memory bandwidth of up to 102 Gb/s, and I/O throughput of up to 64 Gb/s. Each of the highly efficient RAD5500™ 64-bit cores offers direct addressability to 64 GB of memory, improves double precision floating point performance, and achieves 3.0 Dhrystone MIPS/MHz. The RAD55xx platform is designed for insertion into systems using the SpaceVPX standard, supporting the RapidIO data plane, SpaceWire control plane, and I²C utility plane. Architectural trades, the development methodology, technical challenges, and single board computer solutions are discussed.