Development of High-Performance DSP Algorithms on the European Rad-Hard NG-ULTRA SoC FPGA

Abstract

The emergence of demanding space applications has modified the traditional landscape of computing systems in space. When reliability is a first-class concern, in addition to enhanced performance-per-Watt, radiation-hardened FPGAs are favored. In this context, the current paper evaluates the first European radiation-hardened SoC FPGA, i.e., NanoXplore's NG-ULTRA, for accelerating high-performance DSP algorithms from space applications. The proposed development & testing methodologies provide efficient implementations, while they also aim to test the new NG-ULTRA hardware and its associated software tools. The results show that NG-ULTRA achieves competitive resource utilization and performance, constituting it as a very promising device for space missions, especially for Europe.