NEW APPROACHES TO THE IMPLEMENTATION OF EMBEDDED TELEMETRY PROCESSING SYSTEMS

Abstract

The conventional architecture of modern telemetry and signal processing systems typically relies on some combination of specialized hardware and firmware components integrated with commercial rackmount computer platforms running off-the-shelf operating systems. The evolution of the modern system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture, which tightly couples traditional field-programmable gate array (FPGA) elements with high-performance embedded microprocessor cores, offers an alternative to this conventional approach. When effectively utilized, the SoC approach can provide several advantages, including reduced system size and power, increased system security, and lower lifetime operating costs. This paper discusses the benefits offered by embedded SoC architectures for the implementation of satellite telemetry processing systems, and presents an example design that demonstrates advantages with respect to security, reliability, maintainability, footprint, and cost.