A colleague of mine recently went to AHS 2010, a series of annual conferences organized by NASA, ESA and the University of Edinburough. Topics are on-chip learning, on-the-fly reconfigurable FPGAs, et cetera. This year, the conference took place in Anaheim, California, USA (Sough of LA).
Some points from my colleague's presentation:
- One keynote displayed the heat in watts dissipated per square centimeter of chip. Currently, low-power multicore chips are being developed for usage in for example mobile phones. To lower power usage, chips are now divided in layers where the top layer can use optics to form a network that transports data between the multiple cores.
- GSFC is doing a concept study for the Joint Dark Energy Mission, where the challenges are similar to what SRON has encountered during development of the control/readout electronics for the KID detectors, but these detectors work at lower temperatures than what their concept study is using.
- JPL has developed the iBoard, a digital data acquisition platform for quick prototyping. It's however also flight ready. Based on the Xilinx Virtex 5.
- William Zheng, also from JPL, gave an overview of the benefits and challenges of wireless intra-spacecraft communications. There are a lot of possibilities, but mentioned was that no roadmap is in place, which shows how a flight development and/or qualitication track looks like.