Space-based FPGA radio receiver design, debug, and development of a radiation-tolerant computing system

  • Authors:

  • Zachary K. Baker;Mark E. Dunham;Keith Morgan;Michael Pigue;Matthew Stettler;Paul Graham;Eric N. Schmierer;John Power

  • Affiliations:

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM;Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing - Special issue on selected papers from ReconFig 2009 International conference on reconfigurable computing and FPGAs (ReconFig 2009)
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Los Alamos has recently completed the latest in a series of Reconfigurable Software Radios, which incorporates several key innovations in both hardware design and algorithms. Due to our focus on satellite applications, each design must extract the best size, weight, and power performance possible from the ensemble of Commodity Off-the-Shelf (COTS) parts available at the time of design. A large component of our work lies in determining if a given part will survive in space and how it will fail under various space radiation conditions. Using two Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGAs, we have achieved 1 TeraOps/second signal processing on a 1920 Megabit/second datastream. This processing capability enables very advanced algorithms such as our wideband RF compression scheme to operate at the source, allowing bandwidth-constrained applications to deliver previously unattainable performance. This paper will discuss the design of the payload, making electronics survivable in the radiation of space, and techniques for debug.