Nichols Martin
CAES has partnered with Lattice Semiconductor to qualify and distribute the latter’s field-programmable gate array for use in space systems.
The Arlington, Virginia-based electronics manufacturer said Monday Lattice’s radiation-resistant Certus-NX-RT and CertusPro FPGAs will be added to its space product portfolio and offered as reconfigurable processing systems for future satellites.
The Lattice-made FPGAs build on the company’s Nexus platform, which is designed to deliver reduced power consumption in a small form factor. Users can program FPGAs to execute logical tasks.
Lattice used a fully depleted silicon-on-insulator process to produce temperature-resistant tin-lead terminations for the 28-nanometer FPGAs.
David Young, chief technology officer at CAES, said the partnership aims to foster the development of “open, scalable, upgradable architectures” for satellite constellations in low Earth orbit.
CAES will also contribute software programming and design expertise to Lattice’s FPGA development.
Certus-NX-RT FPGA samples are scheduled to be released in early second quarter of the year while Certus-Pro-NX-RT FPGA samples are planned for the following quarter.
