Technology

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Over the past 10 years through NASA funding exceeding $5M, the RadPC computer technology has been matured at Montana State University (MSU) and has now been exclusively licensed to Resilient Computing.  RadPC takes a new approach to providing radiation tolerance in space computing.  Instead of trying to avoid the impacts of space radiation by modifying the underlying materials of integrated circuits (i.e., radiation hardening), RadPC implements a novel computing architecture on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that expects faults to occur and is designed to recover from them.  Using a series of patented software fault recovery procedures, RadPC is able to continue foreground operation in the presence of radiation-induced faults and repair faulted circuity in the background.  The RadPC technology has been matured through flight demonstrations on high-altitude balloons (9x), on sounding rockets (2x), on a 12-month internal test on the International Space Station, and on small satellites (2x).  RadPC has been selected by NASA for another demonstration on the space station in 2021 and will undergo its most sophisticated test yet in 2023 where it will travel to the surface of the moon on the FireFly Blue Ghost Mission 1.  RadPC provides a scalable architecture that can meet the needs of numerous missions.

CyberShield implements redundant, heterogeneous processing cores on a COTS FPGA that are created at software compile-time.  By implementing functionally equivalent cores with randomized instruction sets, a malware insertion attack can be detected and defeated because the attacker only knows the instruction codes (i.e., Opcodes) for the original processor.  When CyberShield detects the same Opcodes in all of the redundant computers, it knows it is executing malware inserted after its original creation.  CyberShield is suitable for applications in the DoD and critical infrastructure where computer availability is paramount but cyber attacks are increasing exponentially.  CyberShield has been developed at Montana State University under DoD funding and has now been licensed to Resilient Computing.  CyberShield can be implemented on top of the RadPC flight computing architecture for space applications that face cyber attacks.