Development of High-Performance DSP Algorithms on the European Rad-Hard NG-ULTRA SoC FPGA

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the European NG-ULTRA radiation-hardened FPGA for high-performance DSP algorithms in space, demonstrating its efficiency and potential for future European space missions.

Contribution

It presents the first assessment of the NG-ULTRA FPGA for space DSP applications, including development methodologies and performance evaluation.

Findings

NG-ULTRA achieves competitive resource utilization.

It demonstrates high performance suitable for space applications.

The hardware and software tools are effective for DSP development.

Abstract

The emergence of demanding space applications has modified the traditional landscape of computing systems in space. When reliability is a first-class concern, in addition to enhanced performance-per-Watt, radiation-hardened FPGAs are favored. In this context, the current paper evaluates the first European radiation-hardened SoC FPGA, i.e., NanoXplore's NG-ULTRA, for accelerating high-performance DSP algorithms from space applications. The proposed development & testing methodologies provide efficient implementations, while they also aim to test the new NG-ULTRA hardware and its associated software tools. The results show that NG-ULTRA achieves competitive resource utilization and performance, constituting it as a very promising device for space missions, especially for Europe.