Telemetry Data Processing: A Modular, Expandable Approach

Abstract

The growing complexity of missle, aircraft, and space vehicle systems, along with the advent of fly-by-wire and ultra-high performance unstable airframe technology has created an exploding demand for real time processing power. Recent VLSI developements have allowed addressing these needs in the design of a multi-processor subsystem supplying 10 MIPS and 5 MFLOPS per processor. To provide up to 70 MIPS a Digital Signal Processing subsystem may be configured with up to 7 Processors. Multiple subsystems may be employed in a data processing system to give the user virtually unlimited processing power. Within the DSP module, communication between cards is over a high speed, arbitrated Private Data bus. This prevents the saturation of the system bus with intermediate results, and allows a multiple processor configuration to make full use of each processor. Design goals for a single processor included executing number system conversions, data compression algorithms and 1st order polynomials in under 2 microseconds, and 5th order polynomials in under 4 microseconds. The processor design meets or exceeds all of these goals. Recently upgraded VLSI is available, and makes possible a performance enhancement to 11 MIPS and 9 MFLOPS per processor with reduced power consumption. Design tradeoffs and example applications are presented.