AFRL, UNM begin new hi-tech partnership

  • Published
  • By Eva Blaylock
  • Air Force Research Laboratory
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, New Mexico --  A collaborative effort here is paving the way for a new center of excellence within New Mexico for the application of Field Programmable Gate Arrays in space and defense systems. Called the FPGA Mission Assurance Center, the project was recently appointed $1.6 million by Congress. 

FPGAs are state-of-the-art electronic chips that can be programmed after manufacture to perform a variety of tasks within the framework of different applications, from cell phones to satellites. 

The new Center, formed in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory's Phillips Technology Institute, is training students on the proper application of FPGAs and adapting the commercial devices for use in demanding space and military environments. 

The FMAC collaboration includes the AFRL's Space Vehicles Directorate, the University of New Mexico, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, XILINX Corp., and SES Consultants. The majority of the activity is being performed by UNM's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and LANL. 

Ultimately, the hope of FMAC is to forge the way for rapid, cost-effective development of programmable logic processors to suit user-specified tasks, in space, defense, and even commercial applications. The planned center will conduct research and development of FPGAs, spanning programming tools, radiation hardening techniques, reliability, testability, trustworthiness, and reconfiguration and repair strategies and will help develop guidelines for FPGA applications. 

In addition to UNM, the Center is reaching out to develop youth education outreach programs throughout the state. The goal is to create a educational pipeline for digital design and reconfigurable electronics from elementary grades through graduate school. The outreach effort builds on the existing AFRL La Luz Academy's science and math program for 5th through 12th grades, Albuquerque Public Schools' Career Enrichment Center and the Rio Rancho High School's Engineering and Design Academy. 

Further down the educational pipeline, FMAC has made collaborations with several community colleges including Central New Mexico, Maricopa Community Colleges, Central Arizona College, and the Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute. The idea is to use the community college springboard to enable students to earn their preliminaries before moving on to the collaborative four-year colleges, including New Mexico State University, New Mexico Tech and UNM. 

There has been interest from other non-N.M. educational institutions to use the Center as an example within their own universities, to include Louisiana State University and the Ibero-American Science and Technology Consortium. 

The FMAC facility at 2350 Alamo Ave., SE, is up and running with instruction and research ongoing.