Zach N0ZGO -

I am fascinated by your comment about the processor "has features which make it more robust". Can you elaborate please?

And to everyone else that posted about the different processors used, thanks! I was a HW/SW engineer for years and developed several in-circuit emulators for Tektronix. Later in my career I taught microcontroller programming at college. I passed some of your info to the current professor there to inspire the students.

-David, N9KT

On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 11:27 AM Zach Metzinger via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:

On 2/1/24 10:07, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB wrote:

...

AMSAT's PACSAT board - a modern version of the microsats - uses a TMS-570, which is an ARM Cortex-R, running at up to 160 MHz with 1280K of flash storage and 192K of RAM. MRAM will be used for BBS storage.

The TI TMS570 "Hercules" processor is also used on the Golf RT-IHU, which will be the successor to the STM32 IHU used on the Fox series.

It is important to note that the low-Earth orbit environment is much more forgiving than MEO and HEO. Radiation tolerance is an important factor when choosing hardware for these higher orbits, which drove the selection of this specific COTS (common off-the-shelf) processor. It is not a SOI (silicon on insulator) radiation-hard processor, but has features which make it more robust than, say, your off-the-shelf STM32 or ATMega64.

73,

--- Zach N0ZGO

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