Director
Microelectronics Design Center at ETH Zürich

Biography

Frank has obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree from Istanbul Technical University and his Ph.D. from ETH Zürich. He currently is a senior scientist working on computer architectures in the group of Luca Benini and director of the Microelectronics Design Center at ETH Zürich. He has been involved in the Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) platform project since its start in 2013 and has been a vocal advocate for open source activities.

Open RISC-V Hardware in Space:
One small step for Space, one giant leap for PULP

The Parallel Ultra Low Power (PULP) platform developed by ETH Zürich and University of Bologna through the past 12 years has resulted in a wide variety of RISC-V based energy-efficient computing architectures which have been made universally available through an open, permissive license. Recognizing the huge potential for space applications, we have successfully designed and tested several PULP-based Systems-on-Chip aimed to address reliability concerns in hazardous environments such as space, while maintaining on-chip computing efficiency. Our mission is to significantly boost on-board processing capabilities especially for edge-AI space applications where the communication to ground station is bandwidth-limited, long-latency, and extremely energy-hungry. In this talk, we will present an of overview these SoCs, and the results so far in our adventure to send PULP based open systems to space.