Aerospace.
Sapphire Computers developed the prototype board and FPGA designs of the Tower CPU (TCPU) board for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formally GLAST) for Naval Research Labs. This satellite is used to provide astronomers and physicists a direct view of galactic gamma-ray sources such as neutron stars, black holes and blazars.
The TCPU is a 64-bit PowerPC VME card with a custom FPGA design that implemented a robust L2 cache controller and custom Reed-Solomon error correction controller for the 256 MB of on-board DRAM to meet the stringent radiation and reliability requirements of the program.
The board also had a custom DMA controller, interrupt control, and dynamic clock frequency control circuitry, power control and on-board Ethernet and Flash memory.
Sapphire Computers’ FPGA design appeared in the Xilinx Newsletter, Xcell.
