Actel Corp. has upgraded its RTAX family of radiation-tolerant FPGAs, adding the S and SL series with greatly reduced power and higher speed.  Actel is positioning RTAX as a primary space-flight programmable architecture, at a time when the space industry is going through some interesting hiccups. The balance among military, civilian, and commercial architectures in space is in flux, and the relative fortunes of commercial orbital imaging vs. intelligence and communication satellites are still very uncertain.   Will FPGAs like the RTAX end up being used more in near-space UAV drones and space planes than in satellites? Here’s the rundown.

In the Rumsfeld era, any military satellite deemed marginally necessary was approved for prototyping. The spooks had Future Imagery Architecture and Integrated Overhead SIGINT Architecture, while the broadband DoD jocks had the Transformational Satellite System, or T-SAT. FIA and IOSA fell victim to budget cuts in the second Bush administration, while T-SAT met its inglorious end in early spring.

Now, Obama chaired a panel on the Next-Generation Electro-Optical System satellites, under which Lockheed will serve as prime contractor for something easier to build than FIA. Intelligence director Dennis Blair also has called for more Pentagon use of commercial systems like DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.

In theory, this represents a good opportunity for RTAX, but in practice, both the government-built and government-leased satellites are only a portion of what was planned ten years ago. Since there are so many launch startups like SpaceX working from privatized space ports, will this mean a new round of private satellites?  Nice idea, but based on the fact that Iridium and DigitalGlobe had to end up selling most of their capacities to the government due to soft commercial demand, I would think that investors will be reticent to plow more money into the private space industry.

This leaves the interesting question of how high in the atmosphere rad-tolerant FPGAs will be required. Low-altitude UAVs already are a prime socket for FPGAs, and if follow-ons to the Global Hawk move to near-space altitudes approaching the U2, this could be an interesting realm where the RTAX FPGA is a candidate. We also should be aware of continuing “space plane” prototypes from the Pentagon’s Falcon program. In any event, this is not your father’s orbital space – not by a long shot.