The European Space Agency (ESA), formed in 1975, provides a vision of Europe's future in space. The agency develops the strategies needed to fulfill this vision through collaborative projects in space science and technology with other space agencies such as NASA.

A key ESA strategy is to equip its spacecraft with embedded microprocessors. ESA chose the SPARCTM microprocessor family from Sun. "We wanted a mainstream, industry-standard microprocessor with an open architecture, high performance levels, a powerful development environment, and strong support from a leader in the field," said Richard Creasey, head of the Control and Data Systems Division of ESA. "Frankly, given those criteria, there wasn't much choice but Sun SPARC architecture. SPARC microprocessors are fully binary compatible with the entire spectrum of Sun platforms, which is important because we use a great many Sun workstations for development."

Current ESA spacecraft contain embedded SPARC V7 chips, which perform a variety of sophisticated operations to support maneuvers and communications. However, ESA could not employ standard SPARC chips in its spacecraft because of the harshness of the environment they would be exposed to. High levels of radiation pose the major problem, and protection against high-energy particles is another concern. ESA contracted with the aerospace division of Atmel Corporation to manufacture special radiation-hardened versions of SPARC microprocessor chips with added features to recover from single-event upsets caused by high-energy particles. [...read more...]

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