Helmut Puchner, Infineon Technologies
Vineet Agrawal, Infineon Technologies
Helmut Puchner, VP Fellow A&D, Infineon Technologies
We will present Infineon’s latest products suitable and tailored for the two major space segments – Traditional Rad Hard/Tolerant and New Space. Especially, the New Space market segment will allow faster adoption of newly developed products at higher mission risk. The different quality and reliability specifications for each market segment will be presented. Newly developed products include numerous radiation hardened/tolerant new space memory products such as boot configuration NOR Flash, Analog-in-Memory Compute Chip, I2C FRAM, LPDDR4 NOR Flash, and Serial PSRAM devices. Memory technology platforms for each of the components will be compared as well as the major radiation effect behavior will be discussed for each of those components. Special focus is given to trade-offs between Commercial-of-the-Shelf (COTs) and higher level reliability components so mission architects can chose the right components for the mission requirements.
Our Analog-In-Memory Compute (AIMC) solution is based on our proprietary SONOS non-volatile memory solution. SONOS allows the execution of the MAC operation within the memory array and avoid power and performance intense shuffling of data between the processor and external memory as given in a classical VonNeuman architecture. AIMC allow performances larger than 100 TOPS/W in classical space applications such as image classification. The specific radiation tolerance of SONOS provides a significant advantage over similar other non-volatile memory technologies such as Floating Gate Flash for AI/ML application onboard processing. Typical floating gate memory devices lose their charge around 20-30krad of total ionizing dose, whereas SONOS can deliver up to 500krad of total ionizing dose tolerance. Combined with it’s reliable operation and read/write endurance it provides an optimum solution for AI/ML applications and implementations in power and radiation limited environments. Target applications include onboard image classification, FFT conversions, or anything involving mathematical processing of large matrices.
Since AIMC operates similar to a co-processor it requires a main host processor which manages the weights of the CNN as well as the data processing stream into the AIMC co-processor. The AIMC co-processor returns a match probability for each image and the applied CNN in realtime. The performance target is set to process 50 frames/sec in realtime for image classification models.
For a complete solution the host processors also require external memory support for either boot configuration or as external buffer memories since the onboard memory density is not sufficient in most applications. We offer several different memory products that support the main processing units. Most of them focus on either low pincount solutions (QSPI, HyperBus) or high throughput (QDRII+/QDRIV, LPDDR4). These memories are offered in different reliability grade level to support different mission requirements. Special focus is given to COTS+ new space components and our ECoLEO (enhanced commercial for LEO orbits) is introduced. ECoLEO components are an economical alternative to QML certified components and targeting the constellation and small satellite market with it’s own radiation and cost requirements. We will provide details on the portfolio as well as a comparison of the major radiation specifications such as Single Event Effects (SEE) including SEU, SEL, SEFI, and Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects.
Summarizing, Infineon Technology is a major supplier of high reliability components for the satellite industry with wide span of reliable components from COTS to ECoLEO to fully qualified QML components.