Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Scientists in Switzerland have developed a low-power, fault-tolerant microcontroller for cubesats that uses the RISC-V architecture. Processors that are bound for space have to deal with lots of radiation that can fudge even the simplest of computations. As a result, the chips tend to be larger in both size and power requirements, with one common processor using a 250nm fab process and running at 5 watts of power.
The new RISC-V based chip, named Trikarenos, is fabbed at a 28nm process and sips a mere 15.7mW. Baked into the design is enough redundancy and error correction to deal with single event upsets caused by radiation. The compact design and low power requirements make the chip ideal for cube satellites, which by their nature are tiny, usually measuring 10 cm on a side, and adorable.
NASA is also getting into the RISC-V arena with a chipset design that will power its High-Performance Spaceflight Computer. As suggested by the name, the RISC-V chip behind the HPSC will be somewhat more robust in terms of cores and compute than the Trikarenos chip. You can look for both chips to make their way into space sometime in 2025. But admit it, they’ve already found a space in your heart.