Ariane 6 equipment: Fault Tolerant Critical Control

Ariane 6 equipment: Fault Tolerant Critical Control Platform

The power electronics driving critical actuators in launchers required real time, hot redundant controllers. Traditional platform with 2 controllers (a nominal and a redundant) cannot react fast enough to ensure control continuity. WATT&WELL developed a controller platform achieving this high-performance constraints, using innovative technologies.

A FPGA based platform, processes ensuring reliability

Any failure of the controller may cause a mission faillure(DAL A). The controller FPGA design is developed using the ECSS processes associated with internal rules to ensure requirements traceability, design reliability and strict coding rules. Verification and validation are done by engineers who do not take part of the development.

A radiation tolerant controller

The space launchmarket is now a highly competitive market. Rad-hard components based designs are not cost efficient enough for this growing market. For instance, a rad-hard FPGA cost 100 time more than an industrial one. WATT&WELL developed a controller based on industrial FPGAs, design to be radiation tolerant by design, using latches triplication. A triplex structure with an enhanced Fault Detection, Isolation and Reconfiguration.