Skip to main content

​
The constraint

Finite power for years. No cloud. No field service. Software must be verifiable before launch — you cannot push a patch to something in orbit, and you cannot ask the spacecraft to phone home for inference. The verification requirement is not bureaucratic. It is engineering. A system that cannot be verified offline cannot be trusted with a payload worth millions, deployed somewhere it cannot be reached.

​
Why spiking networks

µW-class always-on sensing. A payload health monitor or star tracker gate that runs continuously for years cannot afford to run a GPU. Neuromorphic chips in deep-sleep mode consume microwatts. Spiking networks are silent when nothing is happening — which, on a spacecraft in cruise, is most of the time. Deterministic execution. With a seeded RNG and a sealed artifact, every inference is reproducible. Given the same input, the simulator and the hardware produce the same output, within the conformance bound. This is a property of the design, not a claim made after the fact. Frozen artifacts, verifiable forever. The .thx artifact is a sealed, CRC32-verified file. The weights, architecture, and resolved runtime constants are fixed at compile time. The same artifact can be re-verified on the ground, years after launch, against the same simulator. If the behavior is different, you know — the CRC32 tells you.

​
Typical workloads

  • Payload health monitoring: continuous sensing of temperature, vibration, power draw against a learned normal model
  • Star tracker gating: lightweight SNN as a pre-filter, waking the main tracker only when the attitude has changed significantly
  • Structural vibration monitoring: anomaly detection on sparse accelerometer events
  • Onboard sensor fusion at the edge of connectivity: integrate multi-modal event streams without ground-station round trips

​
What THRINDEX provides

The .thx artifact as deployment contract. The artifact contains everything: architecture, weights, resolved constants, CRC32 integrity hash. It is the specification and the implementation in one file. Compile once, verify forever.
Traceability-oriented engineering from day one. The conformance report is a structured, machine-readable document. The fixture fingerprint, the measured metric values, and the envelope version are all in the artifact transcript — not in a spreadsheet.

​
On radiation tolerance

Neuromorphic digital chips are CMOS logic. Radiation tolerance is a function of the specific chip’s process, shielding design, and orbital environment — not a property of THRINDEX. THRINDEX does not make claims about radiation tolerance. Use the appropriate radiation-hardened substrate for your orbit.