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First LEON Silicon Tested Successfully

Posted by timothy on from the nexus-seven-is-next dept.

uglomera writes: "LEON, the open-source CPU developed for the European Space Agency, has been successfully manufactured and tested by Atmel on an Atmel ATC35. Gaisler Research, whose CEO Jiri Gaisler wrote the VHDL model of LEON, also offers a real time kernel, simulator, a cross-compiler, etc. for this SPARC-family processor designed for space applications. Check it out." You can find more good information on the LEON processor on the Gaisler site, including diagrams and further reading. Open Source hardware running Free software -- wheee!

3 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. they will test it, same as a commercial processor by drenehtsral · · Score: 5

    I doubt they plan to send this widget up without a full seperate functionality audit, which they can do for an open source processor, but it might be hard to convince say Intel to let them pore over the VHDL for the celeron or whatever.
    Just because it's open source doesn't mean they aren't going to put it through the same rigorous tests that they would put a commercial processor through.

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    Play Six Pack Man. I
  2. Fault tolerant for hardened environments by Rocky+Mudbutt · · Score: 5
    Please to read the article(s) before firing off
    negative spin.

    LEON

    The LEON model also exists in a fault-tolerant
    version, capable of detecting and correcting
    single-event upset (SEU) errors in any register
    or RAM element. This is done completely in
    hardware without any software intervention.
    The area overhead for the fault-tolerance
    functions is approximately 30% while the timing
    penalty is around 5%. The fault-tolerant features
    makes it possible to use LEON in the severe
    space environment without having to develop specific SEU-hardened cell libraries.     The LEON
    fault-tolerant VHDL model can under some conditions be licensed from ESA -


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    Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
  3. Important for Spaceflight Applications by ec_hack · · Score: 5

    The availability of an inexpensive, radiation tolerant CPU is a big win for space researchers. Right now there are darn few radiation-tolerant parts available for use in space applications due to decreased demand from the military. The International Space Station is using Intel 386s for embedded CPUs, as they are simple enough to be relatively rad-hard. More modern CPUs, such as in the laptops used on the ISS and Shuttle have about one lockup/day due to radiation.

    The design requirements for software controlled systems in space are so stringent that to do anything sophisticated requires incredible redundancy, cross checks among the systems, and increased design complexity, all of which significantly drives up design costs (and causes all kinds of debugging problems). Tell me three times is not enough, you have to tell three controllers three times, three different ways and then they need to cross check. This could be a big step forward for software geeks in space.