NASA SpaceCube 2.0 sports Peregrine UltraCMOS power management solution

SAN DIEGO, USA: Peregrine Semiconductor Corp., a fabless provider of high-performance radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), is receiving early reports from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center that its UltraCMOS-based power management solution is delivering uninterrupted high performance while meeting the radiation-hardened and extreme-temperature requirements at the International Space Station.

Selected for NASA's SpaceCube 2.0 Hybrid Science Data Processor, Peregrine's Point-of-Load (POL) DC-DC Buck Regulators with integrated switches helped the design team meet its goals of delivering "order-of-magnitude improvements" in on-orbit computing performance over traditional flight computing systems.

The Goddard Space Flight Center's SpaceCube systems are "next generation," on-board science-data processors for space missions. The SpaceCube provides 10-100 times the standard on-board computing power while lowering relative power consumption and cost.

The DoD Space Test Program-Houston 4-ISS SpaceCube Experiment 2.0 (STP-H4-ISE 2.0) marks the maiden voyage of the SpaceCube 2.0 model, which achieved a design goal of reducing the PCB card size of the previous model from 8" by 6" to 7" by 4" and increasing processing speed.

The extra performance and smaller size enable SpaceCube 2.0 to support four HD cameras and the "FireStation" heliophysics instrumentation package, which detects and measures terrestrial gamma-ray flashes from lightning and thunderstorms.