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

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.