CEVERO: an open hardware processor for aerospace missions

Abstract

Space environment is a harsh environment for digital circuits. The effects of space radiation on the circuit might result in malfunction and, as a consequence, jeopardize the security and execution of space missions, manned or not. Therefore, there was need to develop digital circuits which can withstand radioactive particle’s strikes and, nowadays, there are several processor technologies which can indeed work safely under such conditions. However, these technologies generally involve proprietary transistor fabrication steps or proprietary cell libraries which inhibit usage and development. There is, nonetheless, another set of architectural methods which operate on a higher abstraction level and are arguably as reliable as the mentioned techniques for a set of space missions. This work uses techniques on a higher abstraction level, such as TMR, ECC and Scrubbing to develop the CEVERO, a general purpose processor base on the existing PULP Platform, which uses architectural modifications such as redundancy and other methods to detect and correct faults, for deploying on aerospace missions.