Study, design and development of embedded systems for space applications

In the frame of Life Science research program the European Space Agency (ESA) planned a flight campaign to perform biological experiments in space onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and the Russian FOTON satellites. Experiment missions in space require data-handling systems to interface and connect sensors, actuators, processing elements, mass-memory units and downlink telemetry sub-systems. In this application field, embedded solutions are contributing to implement reliable systems for the given cost, size, power consumption and development time constraints. Ph.D. research focused on the study, analysis and development of embedded systems for space applications with the aim to satisfy the specific constraints of each experiment and find the best trade-off among the high-level design criteria. The activity mainly deals with the design of a configurable platform to develop quickly high-quality acquisition/control systems. Then the thesis discusses the hardware and software implementation of signal-classification, data processing and analysis algorithms for two scientific experiments in space. Finally the paper presents an automated design of low-power and extensive computation FFT-IFFT processors for future space applications.