On-board spectrum analysis (SIGINT/COMINT) or SAR on-board processing with full floating point FFT-processing now ready for lift-off.

Paper number

IAC-18,D3,3,13,x43207

Author

Mr. Bert-Johan Vollmuller, The Netherlands, National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR)

Year

2018

Abstract

For a long time, FFT-processing was avoided in on-board processing, due to the heavy load on general purpose processors.
Nowadays there are several FFT-cores available, eg for the Virtex-5 Xilinx FPGA or independant FFT IPcores that can be installed on FPGAs, but most of them have lack of accuracy or are limited in FFT-size.

Especially spectrum analysis (e.g. for SIGINT/COMINT applications, but also optical spectrum analyzers such as a Michelson interferometer) or SAR processing require FFT-processing.

ESA developed  the SkyFFT ASIC: a FFT-processing core, in radhard technology, at 100 Mega-complex-samples per second (approx 4 GFlops) with 32bits I and 32bits Q input samples. The EM-model that shows all capabilities at full performance is now ready for demonstration.

This paper will describe the capabilities of this ASIC, the design of the EM-model and the performance results.

Abstract document

IAC-18,D3,3,13,x43207.brief.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-18,D3,3,13,x43207.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

To get the manuscript, please contact IAF Secretariat.