Designing and implementing a reliable thermal monitoring system based on the 1-wire protocol on FPGA for a LEO satellite

Abstract

Thermal control and monitoring is one of the most important factors in the design of satellite systems. An appropriate thermal design should make sure that the satellite's sensitive components remain in their nominated range, even under the vacuum condition of outer space. To achieve this purpose, a reliable and stable monitoring system is required. This paper proposes a monitoring system based on the 1-wire protocol, which provides the reliability requirements in the sensor networking and bus controller sections. In the networking section, we outline some practical topologies and discuss on their complexity and reliability. Despite the fact that the point-to-point topology is very robust for communication structures, the reliability analyses show that the loop-tree topology is the best structure for 1-wire networking. In addition, this paper proposes a robust bus controller based on combined time redundancy and triple modular redundancy on field-programmable gate arrays. The fault injection experiments reveal that the proposed time-based redundancy represents better outcomes alternative to hardware redundancy. Furthermore, the experiments show that the capability of tolerating single-event upset effects in the proposed method increases up to 7.8-fold with respect to a regular design.