Electronics/Computers Spaceborne Hybrid-FPGA System for Processing FTIR Data NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California Progress has been made in a continu- vantage of the reconfigurable hardware in the software, it has been possible to re- ing effort to develop a spaceborne com- resources of the FPGAs. duce execution time to an eighth of that puter system for processing readout data The specific FPGA/embedded-proces- of a non-optimized software-only imple- from a Fourier-transform infrared sor combination selected for this effort is mentation. A concept for utilizing both (FTIR) spectrometer to reduce the vol- the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX hybrid FPGA with embedded PowerPC processors to fur- ume of data transmitted to Earth. The one of its two embedded IBM PowerPC ther reduce execution time has also been approach followed in this effort, ori- 405 processors. The effort has involved considered. ented toward reducing design time and exploration of various architectures and This work was done by Dmitriy L. Bekker, reducing the size and weight of the spec- hardware and software optimizations. By Jean-Francois L. Blavier, and Paula J. Pin- trometer electronics, has been to exploit including a dedicated floating-point unit gree of Caltech and Marcin Lukowiak and the versatility of recently developed hy- and a dot-product coprocessor in the Muhammad Shaaban of Rochester Institute brid field-programmable gate arrays hardware and utilizing optimized single- of Technology for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab- (FPGAs) to run diverse software on em- precision math library functions and a oratory. For more information, contact iaof- bedded processors while also taking ad- modified PowerPC performance library
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