Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems

A Next Generation Digital Signal Processor for European Space Missions

Authors:
Odendahl, M. ,  Yakoushkin, S. ,  Leupers, R. ,  Walter, E. ,  Donati, M. ,  Fanucci, L.
Book Title:
IEEE-AESS European Conference on Space and Satellite Telecommunications
Date:
Oct. 2012
Language:
English
Abstract:
Future European space missions are in critical need of a new digital signal processor (DSP) free of any International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) restrictions. We present a new, highly parallel, 8-slot Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) DSP modeled in LISA, a high-level architecture description language. Necessary software development tools as well as a synthesizable hardware model are generated from this abstract model automatically, improving the productivity and stability significantly.

The synthesis of the generated VHDL code using a 180nm CMOS standard cell library results in an area of around 385 kGates and shows an aggregated peak performance of 1.0 GOPS and 750 MFLOPS, outperforming the only available other option, Atmel's TSC21020F processor, by an order of magnitude.
Download:
BibTeX