Galileo (and other) Computer User Manual

[Riccardo Sibilia]

Hi!

I am looking since quite a long time for a copy of the user manual of
the ATAC-16MS computer onboard Galileo and other space-crafts and I had
no success until now. The processor was made by Itek Corp., Advanced
Technology division around 1979. It is build around 4 1604 bit slice
processor and a 1620 (?) sequencer if I remember correctly.

Is there somebody out there who can help me?

Thanks!!!

Riccardo Sibilia

--
Riccardo Sibilia \
http://www.nari.ee.ethz.ch/~sibilia/
Communication Technology Laboratory \ sib...@nari.ee.ethz.ch
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology \ sib...@ims.ee.ethz.ch
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[Richard B. Katz]

hi,

yes, it is an atac-16ms originally designed by itek but some flight units
were actually fabricated in-house at jpl and they all did undergo
modifications there. some mod's to the circuit designs and the redesign of
a lot of the chips, to harden them to single event upset. the chips were
moved from bipolar designs to a cmos one, redesigned and fabricated at
sandia national labs.

the processor was designed mostly around the 2901 series of devices (2901
[alu], 2902[cla], and 2909[sequencer]) while the address section was
designed around the fairchild 9407[ain't gonna classify that one:-)]. a
pile of the usual ssi and msi was in there and for the microcode, it was
stored in a pile of 512 x 8 bipolar proms, 27s29 (iirc). it had some
programmable logic (was actually going over that today) implemented in a
PLA, the 82s100.

i'm not sure where you got the 1604 and 1620 numbers from, do you have a
reference? the sandia part #'s were oddballs, but these don't ring a bell.

this is a bit of ancient history, but they are still flying around jupiter
(also went to venus on magellan, those two units were the victim of the
aerobraking experiments :-) think i got all of the numbers right, it was
over a decade ago.

hope this helps some,

rk

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[Frank Crary]

In article <35C17C56...@ims.ee.ethz.ch>,

Riccardo Sibilia <sib...@ims.ee.ethz.ch> wrote:
>I am looking since quite a long time for a copy of the user manual of
>the ATAC-16MS computer onboard Galileo and other space-crafts and I had
>no success until now. The processor was made by Itek Corp., Advanced
>Technology division around 1979. It is build around 4 1604 bit slice
>processor and a 1620 (?) sequencer if I remember correctly.
>Is there somebody out there who can help me?

Galileo's computers use the 1802 processor, and I'm reasonably sure
it was a custom job (i.e. not identical to those used on other
spacecraft, although it might be similar.) As for a user's manual,
there are thousands of pages of JPL documents about operating the
spacecraft, but I haven't come across anything solely about a
particular computer.

Frank Crary
CU Boulder