Prof. Fabrizio Ferrandi of Politecnico di Milano’s Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria and his research team will participate in the HERMES project, which started on March 30th, 2021.
Co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, HERMES (High-pErformance pRogrammable Microprocessor and dEvelopment of Software ecosystem) is the final step to finalize the NG-ULTRA development activity supporting the development of all critical software tools ecosystem and qualifying the NG-ULTRA in ceramic CGA 1760 package.
HERMES will provide the European space industry with a key enabling technology. It will offer European space agencies and major customers the state-of-the-art components they need without worrying about exportation regulations. Additional markets beyond aerospace will also be addressed. The main goal of HERMES is indeed to validate and ESCC evaluate a state of the art rad-hard FPGA by integrating all the enabling design and manufacturing technologies needed to deliver high reliability, radiation-hardened integrated circuits.
The ambition of HERMES is to offer Europe new advanced rad-hard FPGA for space applications but also to serve additional markets sharing some harsh environment and high reliability requirements. Markets such as avionics, automotive and energy need extended temperature range, extended lifetime and fault management. Indeed, FPGA is by nature a very versatile integrated circuit which can have many different applications outside a specific market. Therefore, the outcome of HERMES will have a significant impact even outside the space market.