The digital processing unit of the SPICA SAFARI instrument: an FPGA based architecture using the Leon2-FT

Abstract

The Digital Processing Unit (DPU) of the SAFARI instrument on board the SPICA satellite will be the bridge between the Spacecraft Command and Data Management System and the other instrument subsystems. The DPU will implement Telemetry and Telecommand exchange with the spacecraft, commanding and control of the subsystems, instrument health monitoring, scientific data acquisition, compression and formatting. The DPU design has been driven by the requirements for processing power, memory resources and data rates, as well as mass and power budgets. It will be based on a LEON2-FT processor. All the data interfaces will be implemented using the SpaceWire standard protocols. In this paper we provide the present status of the DPU design and describe a prototype board developed to study the performance of the adopted solutions. The prototype board is based on an FPGA where the main DPU processor - a LEON System on Chip - can be implemented. The breadboard provides the memory, connectivity and expandability resources that make it a suitable platform for exploring and evaluating a wide range of HW/SW configurations, as required during the early design phases of the SAFARI DPU. The main characteristics of the proposed processor and of the performed tests are described as well.