Case-study for integration of COTS SoC devices in reliable space systems for on-board processing

Abstract

Recent trends in Data Handling Systems (DHS) include increased data-rates, in-orbit reconfiguration and the introduction of advanced On-Board Processing (OBP) methods to extract actionable information on-board, with low latency. At the same time, NewSpace industry has successfully deployed COTS-based DHS and processing equipment in space. In particular for OBP, COTS-based processors and FPGAs can offer higher computational performances than space qualified equivalents – which in turn can enable new applications through more advanced OBP algorithms. The individual component cost is also lower for COTS than space qualified components, which can allow overall cost-optimisations on mission level.An internal working group at ESA has studied the concept of using "safety barriers" to ensure no propagation of failure from functions implemented with COTS to other on-board units. Thanks to ESA studies there is a path to use Class IV equipment on missions with higher class (Class I-III), through the use of hardware "safety barriers" to limit failure propagation from Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) equipment.In our work, we take the above mentioned concepts and apply them to reference implementations, targeting payload processing modules based on standard form factors (ADHA) and automotive-grade GPU Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). In addition, we make use of previous work on improving in-flight availability of complex COTS SoC processors, through system and software Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) techniques.