Challenges and solutions for space applications: electronic systems design for on-board satellite digital signal processing and networking

The research activity reported in this thesis was focused on efficient solutions to address the challenges in electronic systems design for on-board satellite applications. In particular, this thesis describes three research activities focused on innovative solutions for different on-board satellite sub-systems. The first research activity was dedicated to the realization of an innovative Telemetry, Tracking & Command (TT&C) transponder for small Earth Observation satellites, to cope with the trend of satellite miniaturization, in collaboration with the companies Intecs and Sitael. The key aspects of innovation are the in-flight re-configurability of the communication parameters and the integration of scientific data transmission into the TT&C subsystem. These aspects are important in order to optimize the satellite-to-ground link for Earth Observation purposes and at the same time to reduce the on-board hardware mass. The hardware architecture of the system and the digital signal processing algorithms were jointly designed and optimized towards an efficient hardware implementation. The system proof-of-concept was implemented and tested on a Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA. The second research activity addressed the on-board satellite payload data processing field. In particular, it was focused on the study and design of a Clustering Algorithm (CA) for the Lightning Imager (LI) instrument in collaboration with SELEX ES company, for the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite. The aim of LI is to provide additional information on the detection and localization of lightning events with respect to terrestrial detection systems. The novel CA is able to reduce the big amount of data coming from the LI sensor, to allow the transmission of relevant lightning data to ground, and was designed for the implementation on the Microsemi RTAX2000 FPGA. The third research activity was focused on on-board satellite high-speed data and control networks, carried out in collaboration with the European Space Agency. In particular, the activity aimed at the review and consolidation of the upcoming SpaceFibre standard, the successor of SpaceWire, which is the current state-of-the-art in the field. A SpaceFibre CODEC IP-core compliant with the current standard draft was designed to assess the feasibility of the standard implementation. A hardware demonstrator was realized as a proof-of-concept and for interoperability testing.