Reconfigurable Parallel Satellite-computer Architecture Design

This paper means to design a new on-board computer's architecture for micro-satellite. Nowadays micro-satellite asked that the on-board computer must have new characteristic such as multi-functions, high performance and low cost etc. It is differed from the traditional on-board computer which has drawback such as fixed architecture, low performance and high cost etc.Based on the study of reconflgurable computing technology, the new idea of designing the on-board computer's architecture for micro-satellite with reconflgurable computing technology was analysed thoroughly. Reconflgurable computing is based on the reconflgurable and dynamically reconflgurable hardware and achieved applications in manner of fine-grained parallelism and optimized specialization. These virtues of reconflgurable computing make it a very new potential idea in designing the on-board computer's architecture.According to the idea, a kind of reconflgurable parallel micro-satellite on-board computer's architecture is designed in the paper. And a prototying board of the new computer is realized. The new computer has a reconflgurable computing platform as accelerating system. The detailed design content included the architecture model, hardware architecture, software interface, reconflgurable attributes and the architecture of reconfigurable variants. The prototyping board improves on the traditional on-board computer at the points of more functions realization, higher performance and lower cost.Based on the study of reconflgurable fault-tolerant principle, the reconflgurable fault-tolerant architecture is designed in four levels which are system level, component level, module level and circuit level. The reliability models were analysed and the reliability parameters were computed.