Chandler-based semiconductor giant Microchip Technology Inc. has won a $50 million federal contract to help develop the next-generation processor for spaceflight computing.
The selection by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory taps Microchip (Nasdaq: MCHP) to work over the next three years to design and deliver a High-Performance Spaceflight Computing, or HPSC, processor that will have at least 100 times the computing capacity of the computers now in use.
Microchip’s aim will be to enable scalable computing power to handle different mission needs. Its processor is intended to improve on current state-of-the-art versions with greater reliability, higher fault tolerance and the ability to perform calculations up to 100 times faster.
In addition to the contract award amount, the Valley company — which is one of Arizona’s largest public companies — will also contribute significantly to the costs of research and development.
“We are making a joint investment with NASA on a new trusted and transformative compute platform,” Babak Samimi, corporate vice president for Microchip’s Communications business unit, said in a statement. “It will deliver comprehensive Ethernet networking, advanced artificial intelligence/machine learning processing and connectivity support while offering unprecedented performance gain, fault-tolerance, and security architecture at low power consumption. We will foster an industry-wide ecosystem of single board computer partners anchored on the HPSC processor and Microchip’s complementary space-qualified total system solutions to benefit a new generation of mission-critical edge compute designs optimized for size, weight, and power.”
The contract is part of NASA’s High Performance Space Computing project and is led by JPL in Southern California. The selection comes a year after NASA sought proposals for a trade study for an advanced radiation-hardened computing chip.
NASA envisions the processors being used for future planetary exploration and missions to the surface of the moon and Mars.
“This cutting-edge spaceflight processor will have a tremendous impact on our future space missions and even technologies here on Earth,” said Niki Werkheiser, director of technology maturation within the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. “This effort will amplify existing spacecraft capabilities and enable new ones and could ultimately be used by virtually every future space mission, all benefiting from more capable flight computing.”
Wesley Powell, NASA’s principal technologist for advanced avionics, said that current spaceflight computers were developed nearly 30 years ago. Their limitation now is that they were designed to handle a mission’s most computationally intensive moments, lacking the flexibility for processing power to ebb and flow depending on requirements. Microchip’s new processor will provide that flexibility and will allow certain functions to be turned off when not in use to conserve power.
“Future NASA missions demand significantly increased onboard computing capabilities and reliability,” Powell said in a statement. “The new computing processor will provide the advances required in performance, fault tolerance, and flexibility to meet these future mission needs.”
Officials expect that the processor may ultimately have applications beyond space applications, including commercial systems, industrial automation, edge computing, time-sensitive ethernet data transmission, artificial intelligence and internet of things uses.
The contract award comes a week after President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act, which cemented historic investment into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The measure had support from chipmakers such as Microchip, and it is expected to help propel Arizona forward as a science and technology hub.
Microchip, along with Phoenix-based Onsemi, recently reported record-setting quarterly sales figures as the nation continues to grapple with shortages of widely needed chips. Microchip’s CEO Ganesh Moorthy said at the time that the company is unable to keep up with demand for chips, even as it brings new manufacturing capacity online.
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