The Advanced Technology Airborne Computer (ATAC) was a product of Itek (a division of Litton Industries), used on US naval aircraft and the NASA Galileo spacecraft.
The ATAC was built using AMD 2901 4-bit bit-slice processors and had a basic cycle time of 250 nanoseconds. It could be programmed in HAL/S, and could be microprogrammed to add new instructions. The Galileo project added four custom instructions.
Use by the Galileo project
The Galileo Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACSE) was controlled by two Itek Advanced Technology Airborne Computers (ATAC), built using radiation-hardened AMD 2901 processors. The project wrote their own operating system, GRACOS (Galileo Realtime Attitude Control Operating System), for these computers. The radiation-hardened 2901 processors used in the Galileo spacecraft were fabricated by Sandia National Laboratory.
References
- Tomayko, James E. (March 1988). Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience (PDF). NASA History Office.
