Dr. Pat Parkerson has worked on high-data-rate, high-reliability circuit design for more than a decade.  While at the UofA, Parkerson worked with Space Photinics from the day the company was founded, supporting a local startup company that eventually employed several of his students, a company that contracted with NASA and the Air Force research labs designing and developing components to network satellites and spacecraft.

"This work is very challenging because our goal is to provide space-borne networks that are very high speed, but also have to operate in very harsh environments," he says. "The shaking and vibration that they experience during launch is extreme, and once they are in space they have to survive radiation and extreme temperatures and work for a very long time."
 
Parkerson and his students continue to conduct research on high reliability satellite components for extreme environments.  He has developed a four channel design in which each channel is able to handle about 3.3 gigabits per second, which is around a thousand times faster than a cable modem. By 2010, they are scheduled to be installed on the international space station.

“It's very high data rate," he says, with a bit of a laugh. "It did raise a few eyebrows at first, because we had components that were a hundred times faster than anything else that would meet the reliability requirements.”  Their designs were even a bit premature, he says; there was very little demand for such high data rates, as no one was using that much bandwidth at first. However, the need caught up; satellites flying at thousands of miles per hour now contain sensors that send back high-resolution imaging of various spectra, recording enormous amounts of data, all of which needs to be broadcast back to Earth and captured in realtime.

Doing research with Space Photonics has been an advantage for Parkerson and his students.  They work with national research centers and major avionics companies and these relationships, in addition to contributing to our local economic development, provide a source of high-tech employment that's local for our students.

In the last few years, Parkerson has been shifting his research focus to highly reliable digital design using field-programmable gate arrays. As electronics get smaller and smaller, and try to do things like extend battery life or also operate in harsh environments, more errors occur. The objective of Parkerson's high-reliability research is to automatically detect and correct those errors. According to Parkerson, “Such reliability comes at a cost. It takes additional circuitry and complexity. But transistors are cheap on integrated circuits nowadays," and if a chip already has millions of transistors on it, using several to increase reliability is a small cost to obtain the goals.

Parkerson is also starting to explore many-core architectures that have tremendous computing capability.  Many-core architectures involve using many processors on a single chip, an approach that came, strangely enough, out of the gaming industry. Parkerson said, “A Ph.D. student of mine has 800 different processors on a single die, and the next generation will have about 2,000. So, how to effectively use all that processing capalities? It's a big puzzle.”  A puzzle that computer scientists and engineers in the future will be happy to have to solve.