An On-Board Processor for in Orbit Verification based on a Multi-FPGA Platform
The increasing demand for higher data rates, smaller antenna apertures, or less power at the uplink for mobile devices requires air-interface and application specific processing, especially for telecommunication satellites. Only on satellites for dedicate
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Abstract The increasing demand for higher data rates, smaller antenna apertures, or less power at the uplink for mobile devices requires air-interface and application specific processing, especially for telecommunication satellites. Only on satellites for dedicated applications or with a short limited lifetime, on-board processing is partly used, but processing on-board improves the system performance or increases the system capacity in several cases. Today’s on-board processing for satellite communication is mostly based on ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) chips, which have their main drawback in the limited flexibility. In order to demonstrate and validate the flexibility of an FPGA-based on-board processor (OBP) for space applications the Fraunhofer IIS is involved in a so-called in-orbit verification (IOV) payload on the Heinrich-Hertz-Satellite. During the development of an on-board processor for space applications, the main challenge is to ensure a typical life time of 15 years for the hard-, firm- and software under the given environmental conditions. Alternatively, an FPGA platform can be reconfigured for novel communication protocols. In order to investigate new standards for telecommunication satellite systems, the Fraunhofer IIS is developing an OBP platform, based on four FPGAs. The OBP will be embedded into the H2Sat satellite, which will be launched in 2016 and will be located on a geostationary earth orbit (GEO). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first completely reconfigurable platform based on four leading-edge radiation-hardened FPGAs in the geosynchronous orbit for telecommunication satellites.
Alexander Hofmann (B) Fraunhofer IIS, Am Wolfsmantel 33, 91058 Erlangen, Germany [email protected]
A. Heuberger, Microelectronic Systems. DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-23070-7_15, © Springer 2011
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1 Introduction The H2Sat mission aims to explore and test new communication technologies in space at a technical and scientific level in order to determine how broadband communications, for example, can result in high data rates for a mobile end user [6, 7]. The satellite itself is based on the “SmallGEO” (SGEO) platform of OHB System AG which was developed especially for communication applications. This version offers a maximum of 400 kg and 3.6 kW. The payload includes two parts. One part of the satellite will be equipped with a commercial payload. The other part is a scientific payload, which is placed to perform IOV of different kinds of new payload subsystems developed in Germany. This is to extend Germany’s capabilities in the area of satellite and telecommunication payloads. Today most of the common GEO satellites for telecommunication systems are based on traditional bent pipes [4], which consist of filters, mixers and traveling wave tube amplifiers (TWTA). This “amplify and forward” configuration converts the signal to the downlink frequency and only compensates the effect of total signal attenuation. In most scenarios, meaning traditi
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