Advanced system on a chip microelectronics for spacecraft and science instruments

The development of real system on chip (SoC) applications is mostly driven by the commercial need for low power, portable, and computationally intensive products, but the applicability is obvious in the aerospace sector. Especially for applicability into space the additional difficulties needed to be overcome include radiation hardness for total ionizing dose (TID), single event effects (SEEs), and reliability. In the past several years those properties were the absolute advantage of certain qualified government foundries, however in the recent years more and more commercial foundries demonstrate equivalent or even better performance. Smaller device feature sizes, cleaner oxides and certain standard layout techniques, allow this performance. Additionally the powerful commercial CAD tools for design, simulation, layout, design for testability etc, combined with the wealth of libraries and IP cores (digital and analog), allow one to pack a whole amount of an analog-digital electronics system on a single chip. With the capabilities presented above we developed several SoC components at the Space Department of JHU/APL.