Congress Grants $1.6M for ECE-USAF Partnership

A group of faculty and students at ECE have a leading role in creating a new center of excellence in the State of New Mexico for the application of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in space and defense systems.

Called the FPGA Mission Assurance Center, or FMAC, the project was recently allotted $1.6 million by Congress. Most of the center's work is being done here at ECE and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The key players at ECE are two FMAC Advisory Board members - professors Christos Christodoulou and Marios Pattichis - and ECE Research Professor Steven Suddarth, who serves as director of FMAC, and ECE Adjunct Professor Craig Kief, who serves as the center's deputy director.

The FMAC collaboration also includes the AFRL's Space Vehicles Directorate, the University of New Mexico, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Xilinx Corp., and SES Consultants, and the Air Force Research Laboratory's Phillips Technology Institute.

FPGAs are electronic semiconductors that can be programmed and re-programmed after manufacture - during use in the field - to perform a variety of tasks as needs or circumstances change. The chips have a wide range of applications, from cell phones to satellites. FMAC aims to identify ways to develop these programmable logic processors quickly and inexpensively to suit user-specified tasks for space, defense and commercial applications. Instructors at ECE are training students in the proper application of FPGAs and adapting these traditionally commercial devices for use in demanding space and military environments. FMAC's members are also researching and developing programming tools, radiation hardening techniques, reliability, testability, trustworthiness, and reconfiguration and repair strategies, and will help develop guidelines for FPGA applications.

Lab Upgrades

As part of its support of the FMAC project, ECE upgraded its Microprocessor Lab with PowerPC microprocessors embedded in Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA devices that are mounted on Xilinx ML403 platforms. The platforms allow easy access for advanced video, UART and memory features. ECE Professor Howard Pollard teaches the Microprocessor Laboratory, ECE 344L, which covers the basics of microprocessors and assembly language. ECE also hosted a five-day professors workshop in May for 25 educators from around the globe. They were trained in FPGAs, embedded processing, and digital signal processing.

FMAC's director is Steven Suddarth, PhD (e-mail: directorATfpgamac.com), and its deputy director is Craig Kief (e-mail: DeptDirectorATfpgamac.com). Besides professors Christodoulou and Pattichis, the FMAC Advisory Board has members from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Xilinx, Los Alamos National Laboratory, SES Consultants, and Sandia National Laboratories. The center also has academic advisors from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and from New Mexico State.

The center is located at 2350 Alamo Ave. SE, Suite 100, Albuquerque; telephone 505-242-0339.

To see the release issued by the Air Force Research Laboratory, click here. * * *