A REVIEW: IN ORBIT RE- PROGRAMMABILITY OF DIGITAL SUBSYSTEMS OF SATELLITE

Electronics and Communication engineering

Every Spacecraft/ Satellite has many digital subsystems which are widely used for a various kind of controlling and data processing applications. Field Programmable gate arrays are one of the most common elements of these subsystems considering the last minute programmability. Presently, One Time Programmable (OTP) and SRAM based FPGAs are used in the space programs. SRAM based FPGAs are reprogrammable, however this advantage of re-programmability is not used in the space applications as there is no means exist for re-programmability in space of these FPGA device. It means once the functionality of FPGA is fixed at ground, then it cannot be altered in space. Re-programmability of these devices would be useful to fix the bugs, change the functionalities or addition of the new functionalities in due time course resulting in extension of mission life. Here in this project the concept of the partial re-programmability and full re-programmability of SRAM based FPGA as part of the satellite or space craft would be demonstrated. Here we project the solution to this problem. We are providing the solution by achieving re-programmability with unique protocol. This protocol will be supplied to satellite through tele-commands from the earth-stations. The decoder in the design will debug the information and will supply data to particular location in the memory. Full re-programmability can be achieved by providing whole file through tele-commands. Partial re-programmability can be achieved by providing selected amount of data for particular locations in the memory. This approach will reduce the time.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.