Space based radar on-board processing architecture

This paper describes system-level issues and solutions for space-based radar on-board processing. A modular, upgradeable architecture has been defined and SEAKR Engineering has built three module types as a risk-reduction effort. The memory modules are scalable to 128 Gbits/board with 16 Gbps of I/O capacity. The processing element boards are FPGA-based and use five Xilinx Virtex11 Pro-70 parts. Four FPGAs each have four banks of 18Mbit fast SRAM and the fifth FGPA has 512 MBytes of SDRAM. There are 10 Gbps interconnects between the FPGAs and two 8Gbps external I/O ports. The network switch module is based on RapidIO with the first version handling 4 bidirectional ports with 8Gbps full duplex per port. System partitioning and thermal issues have led to the use of heat pipes for hot parts and advanced materials for the chassis. The system power supply has also been considered to provide 1000 Watts from the system bus to the high-current, low voltages used by the advanced deep sub-micron parts.