On .NET app development and hardware acceleration for satellites – with Lombiq Technologies
A discussion of the benefits and opportunities that .NET development could bring to the space industry, and the challenges of accelerating its adoption.
In this episode we speak with Zoltán Lehóczky, Co-founder and managing director at Lombiq Technologies. Lombiq is a Hungarian .NET software development and services business. We discuss:
- What .NET app development is all about, and what it could bring to the space sector
- The barriers to bringing more software developers into the space industry
- The opportunities, and the risks, that open source software offers
- The changing roles of virtualisation and distributed computing
- How Lombiq is approaching bringing software innovation into the industry
About Lombiq’s software system; Hastlayer
Hastlayer is designed to turn software into specialist hardware, in the form of computer chips. It transforms .NET software into FPGA-implemented logic circuits.
It can be used in ground segment HPC applications (on-premise or in the cloud) and on-board satellites as long as a Xilinx Zynq-based OBC is used.
Hastlayer is designed to enable a wide range of developers with .NET knowledge to create applications for satellites.
As it can function as part of the normal .NET development workflow, hardware acceleration, i.e. utilizing the FPGA of Zynq-based satellite OBCs (on board computers), can be performed without special knowledge.