Development of a cow cost, fault tolerant, and highly reliable command and data handling computer (PulseTM)

Traditionally, command and data handling computers have been designed to manage the different and many remote interface units within the satellite “bus” platform. In this distributed architecture, the command and data handling requires low throughput processors to pass data to other units or for download to ground stations for further processing. The advent of very large radiation hardened ASICs has enabled the application of powerful processing of the RHPPc (PowerPC 603e) with a simplified IEEE-1394 backplane bus to provide a highly reliable and cost competitive centralized command and data handling subsystem. This robust architecture is tailorable and easily modified to meet the varying needs of the satellite and space transportation applications. By using a commercially compliant processor, software and its tools, which are one of the most complex, high risk, and expensive undertaking of the system architecture for a satellite bus controller, become a low risk design issue and much more cost effective. An extensive array of COTS software tools is currently available for the Power PC processor family, rendering the software development environment associated with the Pulse^TM to be a relatively low impact on the overall program thus, reducing the overall program recurring and non-recurring cost. The Pulse^TM supports most of the COTS operating systems with the current board support package (both basic and custom) being designed to be VxWorks compliant