超々小型衛星用ASICのプロトタイピングにおけるオープンソースPDK活用の有効性検討

筆者らは通信を主用途としたフォーメーションフライト（数 cm 程度の超々小型衛星の数百～数千個の集合体）のコンステレーション（同集合体を地球低軌道に数千基配置したもの）構築を検討している．10 万～ 1000 万機の衛星を製造し，かつ通信ミッションでは高速なアナログおよびディジタル処理が求められるため，衛星小型化・高性能化・低電力化・量産コスト削減などの点で汎用民生半導体（マイコン等）の利用は適さず，ASIC 開発が必須となる．これまで宇宙環境向け高機能 ASIC を大量生産し事業投入した実例はなく，試行錯誤を繰り返しつつ設計や製造法を迅速に確立したい．このために OpenMPW 等の活用を検討し，その有効性を調査した．

The authors are studying the construction of a constellation (thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit) of formation flight s (a collection of hundreds to thousands of ultra -small satellites of a few centimeters in size) mainly for communications. 100,000 to 10 million satellites will be manufactured, and high-speed analog and digital processing will be required for communication missions. Therefore, general-purpose consumer semiconductors (e.g., MCU) are not suitable for the satellites in terms of miniaturization, high performance, low power consumption, and cost reduction for mass production, and ASIC development is essential. There have been no examples of mass production and commercial launch of high -function ASICs for the space environment, and we would like to quickly establish design and manufacturing methods through repeated trial-and-error processes. For this purpose, we examined the use of OpenMPW, etc., and conducted a survey on its effectiveness.