Tasked with finding life in the form of microorganisms, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars at about 04:00 EST on February 18, 2021. The rover has multiple sensors and cameras to collect as much data as possible and, due to the volume of live data being recorded and the long data transmission time from Mars to Earth, a powerful processing system is essential.

However, whereas early Mars rovers were equipped mainly with CPUs and ASICs as the processing units, FPGAs are taking on much of the workload in Perseverance. Let’s consider why that is the case.
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