Projects:2021s1-13001 Improving the Resilience of Autonomous Satellite Networks against High-Energy Disruptions

Artist's impression of the Buccaneer Risk Mitigation Mission (BRMM) satellite.

While FPGAs offer a number of benefits for aerospace applications, they are highly susceptible to single event effects (SEE) when exposed to high-radiation environments. These upsets can cause undesirable behaviour within the system, and potentially lead to catastrophic system failure. Students will build upon existing work to develop a novel FPGA configuration scrubber to overcome these effects using an external microcontroller.

Introduction

Project description here

Project team

Project students

• Jack Nelson
• Albert Pistorius

Supervisors

• Dr. Said Al-Sarawi
• Dr. Dharmapriya Bandara (DST Group)

Advisors

• Dr. Brayden Phillips

Project Objectives

1. To design and develop a novel system architecture to detect and correct single event upsets, and to restore system operation in a failure event.​

2. To provide sufficient fault protection such that an industry-rated FPGA may be used in space applications for a minimum period of 2 years (in Low Earth Orbit) without loss of functionality. ​

3. To provide clearly defined research outcomes which can be incorporated into the development process for future CubeSat launches.​

References

[1] a, b, c, "Simple page", In Proceedings of the Conference of Simpleness, 2010.

[2] ...