Was looking into Rad-hard again and came across this article and within it, the below.
Anyone know much on Coherent Logix?
Only because they apparently use digital neuromorphic and on a skim, can't see if it's something like Loihi driven or who?
Satellite and spacecraft designers seek to apply state-of-the art capabilities of commercial electronics components for short- and long-duration missions in the radiation environments...
www.militaryaerospace.com
The quest for commercial-performance electronics in space
June 21, 2023
Satellite and spacecraft designers seek to apply state-of-the art capabilities of commercial electronics components for short- and long-duration missions in the radiation environments of space.
John Keller
Rad-hard solutions
Coherent Logix Inc. in Austin, Texas, offers the HyperX family of radiation-hardened software-defined microprocessors. One of the family's early models, the hx2100, has seen design-ins in a variety of space projects, says Michael Doerr, Co-CEO and CTO at Coherent Logix.
"Satellite payloads, communications, or critical control systems in a spacecraft historically have been built stove-piped with one function and one use case," Doerr explains. "That's not the case anymore. Satellites are multi mission capable, and evolve their missions over time, and need reliability. "Today you Need a fully programmable solution up there. Traditional solution is FPGAs, but are high power, and are not friendly to reprogram from a mission standpoint. To build an ASIC would be very expensive. Our solution provides the performance of an ASIC or FPGA, but has the power consumption of an ASIC. Now getting the best of both worlds. Used to be a pure hardware solution and now is a software solution.
The Coherent Logix HyperX family of programmable space processors offer "a fully software-defined platform for communications, video imaging, AI, and adaptive processing on the satellite, with software-defined networking, and active cyber security. Now you have the ability to do that."
The HyperX family offers the ability to do on-orbit processing at data plane rates," Doerr says. "It's an absolute game-changer with what we can do with cyber security and software-defined networking. The HyperX family, he says is a different type of fabric. "Some call it polymorphic, others call it multiprocessor fabric. It's a blend of all of those. Its heritage is looking at biologically inspired systems of how our brain works. It is digital neuromorphic processing -- a unique architecture that is now being accepted into the marketplace."
HyperX can be designed for low-, medium-, geosynchronous orbits -- for short- and long-duration missions, Doerr says. The company's latest offering is the radiation-hardened HyperX: Midnight system on chip (SoC) processor for commercial space applications like communications satellites. HyperX: Midnight offers as much as four times the computing throughput, half the power consumption, and a 40 percent lower price compared to leading radiation-hardened field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), company officials say.
Software-defined space processors
This enables greater capabilities to be packaged in smaller satellite bus sizes to help lower launch costs and accelerating industry growth. HyperX: Midnight also brings software-defined operations, C-programmability, and simplified software debugging to commercial space. Combined with Coherent Logix’s HyperX Studio design suite, these features offer full on-orbit re-programmability, so improvements can continue long after launch. HyperX SoCs support market solutions across several sectors, including consumer electronics, 5G mobile infrastructure, video/broadcast infrastructure, machine vision, sensor processing, and artificial intelligence.
Just another mention / insight into them in an article around their joining the NFP Greening of Streaming around same time as Microsoft.
My question is does Coherent design and manufacture the hardware for neuromorphic software to run on or a total package?
It’s the big one we’ve all been waiting for. Greening of Streaming has revealed its first hyperscaler member – more than six months since first teasing that one of the big three cloud giants was sniffing around the non-profit initiative. Microsoft is now officially on board, lending its insane...
rethinkresearch.biz
23 February 2023
Microsoft joins GoS, taking shine off novel Coherent Logix
By
Tommy Flanagan
It’s the big one we’ve all been waiting for. Greening of Streaming has revealed its first hyperscaler member – more than six months since first teasing that one of the big three cloud giants was sniffing around the non-profit initiative.
Microsoft is now officially on board, lending its insane scale to Greening of Streaming working groups which are striving for joined-up thinking around the engineering of more sustainable streaming technologies.
With this scale comes a web of insights into where energy demands are taking place across Microsoft’s global technology infrastructure, namely Azure cloud infrastructure. Making that kind of data readily available to Greening of Streaming members should add invaluable color to some of the ongoing data projects, and in many cases accelerate them.
Microsoft wants to educate the world about operating streaming infrastructure at scale, but the giant itself could learn a thing or two from existing Greening of Streaming members. In our experience, the bigger they come, the more resistant they are to change.
Microsoft claims to be championing change from developer to consumer, although it leaves evidence of that to your imagination. There is no indication in the announcement to which GoS working groups Microsoft plans to engage with. However, the timing could be crucial, or simply coincidental, with Greening of Streaming just two weeks ago announcing its LESS (Low Energy Sustainable Streaming) Accord.
One of the early aims of LESS is to gauge industry responses to the idea of encoding video based on energy consumption, rather than on quality. Once the pitchfork-bearing mob subsides, Greening of Streaming plans to produce some kind of palatable framework and then conduct field tests for energy-optimized encoding later this year.
We recall an interaction with Microsoft’s Simon Crownshaw, Worldwide Lead for Media and Entertainment, last year. At the time, Faultline was on the hunt for evidence of Microsoft Azure’s claims about cross-cloud collaboration involving the sharing of sustainability data.
Crownshaw explained that Microsoft has engaged with both competitors and partners as part of industry events and programs to demonstrate the power of the cloud to decarbonize workflows.
No names were mentioned, but Crownshaw did cite that increasing transparency across the industry is paramount in how Microsoft shares data and best practices.
“From a Microsoft perspective, we want to enable industry leaders at the highest level to make the right choices. We are engaged in projects across both customers and potential customers to look at how sustainability will create new business models in the future,” Crownshaw told Faultline.
We are fishing around for more up-to-date comments from Crownshaw and those Microsoft teams engaging directly with Greening of Streaming working groups, and will provide an update once Microsoft is bedded in as an official member.
The immediate downside of Microsoft’s signature is that its giant gravitational pull has drawn the spotlight almost entirely away from another new Greening of Streaming membership, with Coherent Logix joining at the same time.
We are reliably informed that Texas-based Coherent Logix has developed a novel and innovative approach to CPU architecture.
Now in its fourth-generation of HyperX Midnight software-defined SoCs, Coherent Logix has designed the technology with power efficiency top of mind, along with high-performance and upgradability.
These are described as digital neuromorphic semiconductors.
Neuromorphic computing is an approach inspired by the neurons of biological brains, in that compute nodes take the structure of artificial synapses in the brain to process and store data just like neurons.
Faultline first came across the concept of neuromorphic silicon back in 2016, when it wasn’t a concept at all but the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US had just bought the first neuromorphic chip from IBM Research.
The chip was being sold as TrueNorth at the time, in a deal involving a configuration the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses, while only consuming the energy equivalent of a tablet.
Even then, this IBM project was eight years in the making – the result of 200 collaborators working together since 2008. IBM boasted that its TrueNorth neuromorphic silicon could be installed just as easily in a smartphone as a supercomputer in the cloud, and that it planned to include these capabilities in its Watson AI program.
We waited another five years until neuromorphic silicon reappeared on our radar, not from IBC but from audio and imaging sensing technology developer DTS, part of Xperi and a sister company to TiVo. DTS announced in April 2021 what claimed to be the world’s first neuromorphic driver monitoring system, designed for gaze tracking, head pose monitoring, identification, and eyelid opening.
Circling back to Coherent Logix, the company claims to have pushed back the breakdown of Moore’s Law by over 20 years. The law
states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every two years, though the cost of computers is halved.
Coherent Logix’s HyperX silicon is targeted at always-on devices. With more and more always-on devices shipping, there are concerns about the rising impact on energy consumption of the connected home. While nominal in the grand scheme of things today, it is inevitable that CPE and connected devices will account for a rising share of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Coherent Logix’s HyperX processors are therefore targeted at always-on devices, which – just like the human brain – contains processing elements that only consume power when they are thinking.
HyperX processors claim to offer up to 4x the performance of competitors, while consuming just half the power.
With those kind of claims, imagine the kind of impact Microsoft could have on reducing the power consumption of its IT infrastructure and that of its partner network by taking a license with Coherent Logix. Well, it’s just as well the two companies will now be squeezed into the same room.
