NASA Joins Forces With Small Business Team
Proposed System Architecture Application for Space Advancement
MUENSTER,TEXAS, March 2021: NASA has selected 365 U.S. small business proposals for initial funding from the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, with Tactical Computing Laboratories being included on the list. NASA’s enterprise of encompassing the industry of small businesses has the hope the venture will help propel the human presence in space and beyond.
Through the program, NASA works with U.S. small businesses and research institutions to advance cutting-edge technologies. Through these endeavors, TCL plans to address the needs of image processing and other data parallel scientific applications with RadRISC; a scalable architecture composed of simple cores based on the RISC-V ISA. TCL plans to deploy an integrated development environment for RadRISC using their open source, advanced SoC development infrastructure, System Architect. The preliminary system architecture includes an arrangement of RISC-V cores connected via a RapidIO fault tolerant switch connected to fault tolerant memories.
By enabling both the hardware techniques and the series of compiler-driven software techniques, TCL’s role in this project will asset in astronomical advances such as:
- Mission-specific, radiation hardened high performance cores based upon the RISC-V ISA
- Robotic control systems for flight operations and landing vehicle operations
- Extended to create autonomous robotic vehicles and to traditional autonomous satellite or deep space probe devices
In addition, TCL’s proposed approach can also be applied to other mission critical systems. The agency provides up to $125,000 for companies to “establish the merit and feasibility of their innovations.” With more than 30% of the awards—and total investment of $45 million — went to first first-time NASA SBIR/STTR recipients, TCL has been given an opportunity to stamp their mark in space.
About Tactical Computing Laboratories: Tactical Computing Laboratories (TCL) was founded in 2016 upon the groundwork that software is a first-order design principle in hardware development. Knowing computing hardware and software architectures would not be sufficient to meet the ever increasing demands of scalable, data intensive computing, TCL’s mission is to optimize a platform’s micro architecture for application-specific workloads. Holding vast experience in designing advanced computing platforms for computationally-intensive and data-intensive workloads has also been in the central principal of every project.