Leon3FT 32bit Sparc processors have redundancy and radiation tolerance built in… open source hardware design ftw….
Technically the latest Leon4 isn’t open yet hopefully it will be though. The Leon4 runs at at 200Mhz on FPGA development boards and upto 1.5Ghz if ASIC tech were used. NASA should definitely throw a few million at this to get the newer designs rad tolerant and implemented in ASIC tech a much better usage than what they usually throw billions at. The ESA already contracted for the Leon3ft… I don’t see why NASA shouldn’t pitch in a bit here too.
Yeah we use alot of the LEONs (Germany). Right now I’m developing on a Leon3FT. Ok the FPGA runs at around 20Mhz, which is very slow compared to a desktop processor, but with the amount of exploitable parallelism we can achieve very high throughput.
Edited 2010-09-28 07:18 UTC