Flash-based Development, Spaceborne High-capacity Memory

The data record equipment is one of the key equipments for information retrieving, merging, transmission and processing in the satellite and other equipments used on the spacecraft. Large capacity, high speed, high density, low power consumption, low cost, high reliability and flexibility are always the primary research areas and goals of information storage technique of the data record equipment. In the past few years, with the development of electronic technology and semiconductor storage device, solid state recorder (SSR) based on DRAM and Flash Memory has taken place the tape recorder, magnetic disk and magnetic-optic disk and been the dominating solution for the storage of mass data in the spacecraft.Solid state recorder based on FLASH has a number of remarkable advantages, such as, high capacity density, small dimension, low power consumption, low cost, non-volatility, endurance for shake and impulsion and wide-range temperature and so on. Due to these merits, it has attracted the attentions of the researchers in the world. However, because of the low speed of program operation and the invalid blocks of flash memory, if we want to make it the storage medium of solid state recorder on the spacecraft, several problems need to be resolved: 1) how to improve the speed of program and erase operation of flash memory; 2) how to map out and bypass the invalid blocks and effectively manage the mass memory space.After thoroughly collecting and earnestly studying the latest information in this field, this thesis tries to find a solution for the problems above and designs a 32Gbits high-speed SSR with FLASH as its medium, according to the advanced experience and technologies from abroad. Pipelining and parallel technology, accompanying with fast FIFO as cache memory, instead of direct program operation, are adopted in the scheme and increase the transmitting speed dramatically; FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is applied to realize the complex control logic of the system and makes it integrative, flexible and fast; 386EX based embedded system, along with Vxworksreal-time operating system is introduced to substitute the microcontroller based system to simplify the hardware design and enhance the overall performance of SSR, and will make the system more easier to be applied to the projects in the future. The fruit of the thesis establishes a firm foundation for the actual development of flash memory based SSR used on the satellite and is very useful for reference.