After the preliminary GINA study based on LEON3, completed in 2006, Cobham Gaisler (formerly Aeroflex Gaisler, hereinafter called CG) has started the first development phase of the Next Generation Microprocessor (NGMP) under a TRP contract. This first phase was kicked off in summer 2009, and it comprises the architectural (VHDL) design, verification by simulation and on FPGA. FPGA boards have been made available in 2010. The design is a quad-core LEON4 based microprocessor with L2 cache and numerous peripherals.
The development of Functional Prototypes of the NGMP, called NGFP, has been started in April 2011. These prototypes have been manufactured in 45 nm commercial structured ASIC technology eASIC Nextreme2. While the FPGA prototypes include only a subset of the NGMP features, and their clock frequency is limited to 45 - 70 MHz, the goal of NGFP is to allow functional validation and evaluation by end users of an almost fully fledged NGMP implementation. NGFP contains most of the features of NGMP (except the high speed serial links), and runs at a clock frequency of 150 MHz, which is a good step towards the final space ASIC implementation. Development boards have been made available in 2013 under the product name GR-CPCI-LEON4-N2X.
The implementation of Engineering Models (EM) in space chip technology was started in Q2/2014, using the C65SPACE platform from ST Microelectronics. Compared to the full NGMP baseline design and the NGFP prototypes, a somewhat modified version has been implemented. This design is now branded as GR740. The GR740 Advanced Datasheet has been released in April 2015, and manufacturing was started in June 2015. Rad-hard EM prototypes have become available in Q2/2016. After design updates and fixes, flight silicon was manufactured in Q1/2018, and validation completed successfully in 2018. Subsequently, flight parts have been manufactured, qualification testing has been completed, and the qualification datapackage has been submitted to DLA for QML-V certification in Q2/2021.
News
Preliminary Documentation of the NGMP space microprocessor
Documentation of the NGFP 'Functional Prototype' in commercial ASIC technology
