Prospection of Reconfiguration Capabilities using Space Qualified SRAM-based FPGAs for a Satellite Communications Application

Abstract

Power consumption and reliability are key issues in space system applications. During the flight, electro-magnetic radiation may cause single event damage effects including SEUs, SEFIs, SETs and others. In order to mitigate these problems, a system with dynamic and partial reconfiguration capabilities is proposed. This approach provides a possibility to reconfigure parts of the design during the operation thus making the system flexible, fault tolerant and less power-consuming. Two partial reconfiguration methodologies are proposed and compared in terms of power consumption, flexibility, and size of memory footprints.