After reading about Moore's law and the amount of transistors of CPUs on Earth, I learned that currently there are chips out there with roughly 50 billion transistors:
(Image source: wikipedia)
However, the application of space technology is often a bit more conservative, as it often requires proven technology.
Hence, I was wondering how many transistors are there in typical 2020 satellite bus CPUs*? And what does More's law look like applied to satellite bus CPUs* transistors only?
I found two data points:
- the RAD750 has 10.4 million transistors. It was first introduced in 2000 and flew through space for the first time in 2005 according to wikipedia.
- the 603e has a transistor count of 2.6 million, and is used by Honeywell as in satellites.
Yet I did not find any proof of satellites with CPUs with a number of transistors that is in the order of billions.
* Notes
In response to the comments:
- I would like to narrow the question down to the number of transistors in the CPU of the satellite, ignoring transistors in other locations.
- I would like to explicitly narrow down the question to satellite bus CPUs that are used to maintain the spacecraft's basic operation (e.g. attitude control, power and thermal maintenance, station keeping maneuvers, etc.).
- Note 2 implies the question ignores application-specific processors on the payload side (for example: synthetic aperture radar signal processors with mixed CPU/DSP/FPGA).
