The Design And Manufacture Of Counter Array Based On Dual-port RAM

Severe space environments threaten satellites and spacecrafts usually. Among them are particle events that are the enhancements of the charged particle with high energy in the space. The high energy particle can penetrate through the skin of satellite and be accumulated inside it. The effects of particle events include the Single-Event Upset (SEU), Single-Event Lock (SEL), and the electric discharge inside satellite. The former can produce software errors and the letter two can cause damage of satellites. Therefore, measurement and study on the hazard of high-energy particles are very important. The most important measurements of the high energy particle are its energy and flux. To measure them in the space, each particle entered the detector with special energy and direction, even with special component, is counted by a counter.Here we design a counter array for the measurement of the particles with multi-directions and multi-channels of energy. The counter array is based on the technique of the Dual-Port RAM, and made up of four modules. They are the Dual-Port RAM module, Look-up Table module, Timing module and Counter module. The counter array has 1024 addresses, which can be used for 1024 counter channels. Each of them is a 24-bit counter, and the maximum data can be 16777215. The count rate of the counter array can be up to 5 MHz.In order to prevent from SEU in the space environment, we give a suggestion by adopting the technique of the triple hardware redundancy.This counter array with Dual-Port RAM can be used not only in the space, but also in the other radiation instrument or some area where need the counter of multi-channels.