Nishinaga No. 1 B199/MAPLD2004 Reconfigurable Communication Equipment on SmartSat-1 Nozomu Nishinaga Makoto Takeuchi Ryutaro Suzuki Smart Satellite Technology Group Wireless Communications Department National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

Nishinaga No. 2 B199/MAPLD2004 Outline  Motivation  SmartSat-1  Reconfigurable Communication Equipment  Onboard software defined radio  Heavy Ion test results of Vertex II pro  Conclusion

Nishinaga No. 3 B199/MAPLD2004 Motivation  For next-generation satellite communications: bandwidth expansion expected (HIGH data rate: more than 1.5 Mbps)  To expand bandwidth: Higher carrier frequency and Regenerative relay + Onboard switching  Issue: Increased carrier frequency (ka band and above) requires high rain margin  Solution: Regenerative relaying by installing multi-rate moderator/demodulator on communication satellites

Nishinaga No. 4 B199/MAPLD2004 Bent-pipe relay system  Bent-pipe, through repeater, or frequency conversion (dumb hub)  Most commercial communication satellite systems have this kind of repeater  All signals received at the satellite are amplified and sent back to base station  Supports Point-to-Point link

Nishinaga No. 5 B199/MAPLD2004 Regenerative Relay + Onboard Switching  All signals received at the satellite are demodulated, switched, re-modulated and sent back to the base station (terminated in L2).  Full mesh network (Multi points-to-Multi points).  3-dB power gain  Boost the total system bandwidth by the statistical multiplexing effect by using the onboard baseband switch  Flexible link design  Already been tested and demonstrated with experimental satellites  Still few commercial satellites with this type of transponder

Nishinaga No. 6 B199/MAPLD2004 Issues (1) Recent communication satellite system: year lifetime  Cannot comeback from Geostational orbit  Cannot upgrade communication system installed in satellites  Flexible link design, but system not flexible IMAGINE the communication systems of 20 years ago! Acoustic coupler+RS232C+HDLC? (300 bps) Balefire? (1 bpd?)

Nishinaga No. 7 B199/MAPLD2004 Issues (2) Traditional method  Many fixed-rate MODEMs  Huge redundant system  Test procedure complicated  Heavy payload Software-Defined-Radio method  Many multi-rate MODEMs  Simple redundant system  Test procedure very simple  Payload not so heavy

Nishinaga No. 8 B199/MAPLD2004 Objectives 1.Technological demonstration of onboard software-defined radio Versatile onboard modulator and demodulator (MODEM) with SDR technique application proof of highly functional onboard transponder application proof for next-generation communication satellite Adaptable to latest communications technology with flexible link design and high data rate 2.Gracefully degradable equipment with functional redundant technique Reliability enhancement of onboard MODEM with software-defined radio flexibility Paradigm shift from dual or triple modular redundant system with exclusive equipment to functional redundant system with versatile equipment Introducing a soft fault decision process (multilevel, not “hard decision”) for extending mission equipment lifetime (autonomous fault decision and resource evaluation) Reducing redundancy by assigning a light load to partially “out of order” equipment with taking account of a required computational complexity disequilibrium in an onboard MODEM

Nishinaga No. 9 B199/MAPLD2004 SmartSat-1 Twin 150-kg class experimental satellites Missions:  CME/plasma cloud observation  Orbital maintenance experiment  Optical inter-satellite communication experiment  Reconfigurable communication experiment Launch:  FY2008 Orbit:  Geostational transfer orbit (piggy-back launch) [SmartSat-1b ] [ SmartSat-1a ]

Nishinaga No. 10 B199/MAPLD2004 Reconfigurable Communication Equipment  Onboard software-defined radio (OSDR), IF components, RF components, and two antennas for reception and transmission  Weight: 16 kg (TBD); Power consumption: 80 W (TBD)

Nishinaga No. 11 B199/MAPLD2004 OSDR: Breadboard model  Designed and manufactured in 2002  Dual XCV100s+ 1 XCV 100 (for controller)  Normal operation mode (full spec. filtering) and degeneracy mode (half throughput)  Designed and manufactured in st generation 2nd generation

Nishinaga No. 12 B199/MAPLD2004 The second generation OSDR BBM  Dual FPGA banks (1,2,3 and 4,5,6), each bank includes 3 2VP4s.  The Control FPGA will be replaced with an Anti-fuse type FPGA.  Triple modular redundancy mode and daisy chain mode

Nishinaga No. 13 B199/MAPLD2004 Onboard SDR Multi-rate and Multi-modulation support  2 kbps–1 Mbps  QPSK (16QAM)  Forward error correction not implemented yet Two service classes  Highly reliable operation (triple modular redundancy mode)  High-throughput operation (daisy-chain mode)  (Degeneracy mode) New function loadable  New configuration data uploadable by itself Readback inspection

Nishinaga No. 14 B199/MAPLD2004 Triple modular redundancy mode  TMR voter implemented on controller FPGA

Nishinaga No. 15 B199/MAPLD2004 Daisy chain mode

Nishinaga No. 16 B199/MAPLD2004 Degeneracy mode  Modulation and encoding require lower computational complexity than demodulation and decoding, respectively.  A bank including a failure FPGA is assigned a modulation/encoding function.

Nishinaga No. 17 B199/MAPLD2004 Readback issues  System requirements: 3.0M-bit data for FPGA 18M-bit data for 6 FPGAs Need 54M-bit data for Readback operation (including MSK and RBB) On-the-fly compression/decompression

Nishinaga No. 18 B199/MAPLD2004 Radiation test of Virtex II Pro  Virtex II pro (XC2VP7-5FG456)  Test carried out in November 2003 at TIARA in Takasaki, Japan  Heavy Ions (N, Ne, and Kr)  Result compared with that of Virtex II. (Gary Swift, Candice Yui, and Carl Carmichael,” Single- Event Upset Susceptibility Testing of the Xilinx Virtex II FPGA,” MAPLD2002, paper P29)

Nishinaga No. 19 B199/MAPLD2004 Radiation test result (1) Block RAM region

Nishinaga No. 20 B199/MAPLD2004 Radiation test result (2) Configuration Memory region

Nishinaga No. 21 B199/MAPLD2004 Summary  Overview and development status of reconfigurable communication equipment on SmartSat-1  Result of Vertex II pro radiation test: No obvious difference performance compared with that of Virtex Issues  Configuration data compression  Online health checking