Carefully Managing Both Commercial and Space Requirements and Concerns
Some
of today's leading-edge research comes directly from the space community.
To best serve this market, the electronics community must carefully balance existing trends and requirements in the commercial market with the needs and concerns of aerospace designers. This is of particular importance as space designers are turning more to commercial parts in response to a diminishing space electronics supply base.
For example, power consciousness is top-of-mind in commercial electronics. Space customers benefit as work to establish lower commercial power consumption carries over to space design. Certainly, power consumption from terrestrial power sources is not as critical as power consumption in space due to the spacecraft's restrictions on solar panel size, nuclear power source, or size and weight of power supply components, thus limiting power budgets. Offering low-power consumption in addition to critical radiation tolerance, Actel's new RTAX-SL FPGA is an example of the careful balancing of commercial trends and aerospace requirements.
Another
issue facing space designers is product obsolescence. Often, the product
lifetime of today's build-to-print space system exceeds the lifetime
of the commercial ICs, meaning that the devices may have passed end-of-life
(EOL) while the system is still in production. In order to avoid an expensive
and time-consuming design update and system requalification, the manufacturer
has to scramble to acquire the EOL devices from whatever sources are
available.
