Nasa wants to equip its spacecrafts with modern chips

Recently, Nasa signed a $50 million collaboration agreement with Microchip Technology, a chip company based in Arizona.

Now Zdnet reports that Nasa has signed a similar collaboration agreement with Sifive, an American chip company best known for designing RISC-V processors.

The purpose of the agreements is to develop new HPSC processors (High Performance Spaceflight Computing) to be used in future rockets, rovers and other vehicles that explore space.

The goal is for the new processors to be a hundred times faster than those currently used. In addition, they must be able to withstand extreme temperatures and cosmic background radiation.

• This ground-breaking spaceflight processor will have a huge impact on our future space missions and also for technology here on Earth, said Niki Werkheiser from Nasa in connection with the signing of the agreement with Microchip Technology.

In this context, it can be mentioned that most of the technology used in today's spacecraft has more than 30 years behind it, which makes it difficult to find working spare parts.