A Hybrid-FPGA System for On-Board Data Processing Targeting the MATMOS FTIR Instrument

Abstract

The MATMOS Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer is one of three scientific instruments on the previously proposed MARVEL mission. MATMOS requires computationally intensive floating-point signal processing to reduce the amount of data prior to downlink. With the goal of reducing design time and the size and weight of instrument electronics, this paper presents an FTIR spectrometry implementation targeting the Xilinx Virtex-4FX hybrid-FPGA and its embedded PowerPC 405 processor. We explore different hardware and software optimizations and architectural configurations of the hybrid-FPGA system to demonstrate optimal performance in onboard data processing. By including a dedicated floatingpoint unit and dot-product co-processor in the hardware as well as utilizing optimized single-precision math library functions and a modified IBM PowerPC performance library in the software, we demonstrate a more than 8x reduction in execution time compared to the non-optimized software only implementation. A dual-processor design concept as an enhancement that would further reduce the execution time is also presented. 1 2 3

Near-infrared remote sensing of Los Angeles trace gas distributions from a mountaintop site

“…This information is obtained from the reference laser interferograms. In CLARS-IPP, the algorithm that computes the instantaneous velocity was written for the Mars Atmosphere Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer (MATMOS) project (Pingree et al, 2007;Bekker et al, 2008Bekker et al, , 2009. This technique has been demonstrated in previous studies (Brasunas and Cushman, 1997;Manning and Combs, 1999;Campbell, 2008).…”

Near-infrared remote sensing of Los Angeles trace gas distributions from a mountaintop site

“…This information is obtained from the reference laser interferograms. In CLARS-IPP, the algorithm that computes the instantaneous velocity was written for the Mars Atmosphere Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer (MATMOS) project (Pingree et al, 2007;Bekker et al, 2008Bekker et al, , 2009. This technique has been demonstrated in previous studies (Brasunas and Cushman, 1997;Manning and Combs, 1999;Campbell, 2008).…”

Advancing NASA’s On-Board Processing Capabilities with Reconfigurable FPGA Technologies

“…Averaging scans taken above the atmosphere and then performing lossless compression further reduces the volume of data to be transmitted to Earth. In a 2007 technology demonstration, the Xilinx V4FX60 FPGA was evaluated for its FTIR spectrometer data processing capability targeting the MATMOS instrument development (Bekker et al, 2008). By optimizing floating-point calculations necessary for processing and compression of MATMOS data prior to downlink, a more than 8x reduction in execution time was achieved on the FPGA however, these results still lagged behind the Rad750's processing capabilities.…”