Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “Field Programmable Gate Array”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2008

Column Grid Array Rework for High Reliability

Due to requirements for reduced size and weight, use of grid array packages in space applications has become common place. To meet the requirement of high reliability and high number of I/Os, ceramic column grid array packages (CCGA) were selected for major electronic components used in next MARS Rover mission (specifically high density Field Programmable Gate Arrays). ABSTRACT The probability of removal and replacement of these devices on the actual flight printed wiring board assemblies is deemed to be very high because of last minute discoveries in final test which will dictate changes in the firmware. The questions and challenges presented to the manufacturing organizations engaged in the production of high reliability electronic assemblies are, Is the reliability of the PWBA adversely affected by rework (removal and replacement) of the CGA package? and How many times can we rework the same board without destroying a pad or degrading the lifetime of the assembly? To answer these questions, the most complex printed wiring board assembly used by the project was chosen to be used as the test vehicle, the PWB was modified to provide a daisy chain pattern, and a number of bare PWB s were acquired to this modified design. Non-functional 624 pin CGA packages with internal daisy chained matching the pattern on the PWB were procured. The combination of the modified PWB and the daisy chained packages enables continuity measurements of every soldered contact during subsequent testing and thermal cycling. Several test vehicles boards were assembled, reworked and then thermal cycled to assess the reliability of the solder joints and board material including pads and traces near the CGA. The details of rework process and results of thermal cycling are presented in this paper.

high reliability↗
DOE OSTI2019

The JET upgraded toroidal Alfvén Eigenmode Diagnostic System

The Alfvén Eigenmode Active Diagnostic system (AEAD) has undergone a major upgrade and redesign to provide a state-of-the-art excitation and real-time detection system for JET. The new system consists of individual 4 kW amplifiers allowing for increased current, separate excitation and real time control of relative phasing between antenna currents. The amplifiers have a frequency range of 10–1000 kHz, divided into various frequency bands by external matching filters. Due to the varying transmission line impedance throughout the frequency range, the amplifiers were designed with a very high resilience to reflected power. The existing amplifier control electronics have been replaced with a digital control system incorporating a National Instruments platform and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) modules for frequency, gain and phase control with a frequency and phase resolution of less than 1 kHz and 1 degree respectively. Complementing the digital control system is the Protection and Control System, which utilizes Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs) and an array of electronic devices to monitor and control the AEAD. New capabilities such as independent antenna current/phase control, allow for improved excitation control, better definition of antenna spectrum combined with enhanced system reliability. This paper will review the new AEAD system, its unique capabilities and improvements over the previous diagnostic system.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
NASA NTRS2012

RFI Risk Reduction Activities Using New Goddard Digital Radiometry Capabilities

The Goddard Radio-Frequency Explorer (GREX) is the latest fast-sampling radiometer digital back-end processor that will be used for radiometry and radio-frequency interference (RFI) surveying at Goddard Space Flight Center. The system is compact and deployable, with a mass of about 40 kilograms. It is intended to be flown on aircraft. GREX is compatible with almost any aircraft, including P-3, twin otter, C-23, C-130, G3, and G5 types. At a minimum, the system can function as a clone of the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) ground-based development unit [1], or can be a completely independent system that is interfaced to any radiometer, provided that frequency shifting to GREX's intermediate frequency is performed prior to sampling. If the radiometer RF is less than 200MHz, then the band can be sampled and acquired directly by the system. A key feature of GREX is its ability to simultaneously sample two polarization channels simultaneously at up to 400MSPS, 14-bit resolution each. The sampled signals can be recorded continuously to a 23 TB solid-state RAID storage array. Data captures can be analyzed offline using the supercomputing facilities at Goddard Space Flight Center. In addition, various Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) - amenable radiometer signal processing and RFI detection algorithms can be implemented directly on the GREX system because it includes a high-capacity Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA prototyping system that is user customizable.

Bradley, Damon↗
DOE OSTI2021

Searching for metastable particles using graph computing

The reconstruction of charged particle trajectories at the Large Hadron Collider and future colliders relies on energy depositions in sensors placed at distances ranging from a centimeter to a meter from the colliding beams. We propose a method of detecting charged particles that decay invisibly after traversing a short distance of about 25 cm inside the experimental apparatus. One of the decay products may constitute the dark matter known to be 84% of all matter at galactic and cosmological distance scales. Our method uses graph computing to cluster spacepoints recorded by two-dimensional silicon pixel sensors into mathematically-defined patterns. The algorithm may be implemented on silicon-based integrated circuits using field-programmable gate array technology to augment or replace traditional computing platforms.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

DRIPS: Dynamic Rebalancing of Pipelined Streaming Applications on CGRAs

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) provide higher flexibility than application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and higher efficiency than fine-grained reconfigurable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). However, CGRAs are generally designed to support offloading of a single kernel. While their design, based on communicating functional units, appears to naturally suit data streaming applications composed of multiple cooperating kernels, current approaches only statically partition the resources across application kernels. However, emerging streaming applications at the edge (scientific instruments, sensor networks, network processing) perform much more than digital signal processing and often are data and input dependent. This leads to extremely variable kernel execution times, severely impacting the throughput of the entire pipeline if resources are only statically allocated. Therefore, in this paper, we propose DRIPS — a coarse-grained, dynamically, and partially reconfigurable array for data-dependent streaming applications. We present a unified compiler framework to facilitate the mapping of a given streaming application onto the DRIPS CGRA architecture. The experimental results show that DRIPS achieves an average throughput improvement of 1.46$\times$ across a set of representative applications over a statically partitioned solution. The additional area overhead to enable dynamic rebalancing consumes 16.34% of the entire area for a 5x5 CGRA prototype.

Tan, Cheng↗
DOE OSTI2021

DynPaC: Coarse-Grained, Dynamic, and Partially Reconfigurable Array for Streaming Applications

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) provide higher flexibility than application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and higher efficiency than fine-grained reconfigurable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). However, CGRAs are generally designed to support offloading of a single kernel. While their design, based on communicating functional units, appears to naturally suit streaming applications composed of multiple cooperating kernels, current approaches only statically partition the resources across kernels. However, streaming applications often are data-dependent, leading to variable kernel execution times depending on the input data and impacting the throughput of the entire pipeline if resources are statically allocated. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the design of DynPaC — a coarse-grained, dynamically, and partially reconfigurable array for data-dependent streaming applications. We discuss the required software and hardware components to manage partial dynamic reconfiguration. We demonstrate that by supporting partial dynamic reconfiguration, we can obtain an average speedup of 1.44X for a representative set of applications w.r.t. static partitioning, with a limited area overhead (6.4% of the entire chip).

Tan, Cheng↗
DOE OSTI2026

Gaia: segmented germanium detector for high-energy X-ray fluorescence and spectroscopic imaging

We present Gaia, a monolithic array of 96 high-purity germanium pixel detectors integrated with a custom low-noise application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based data acquisition system. The sensor operates at ∼100 K using a commercial closed-cycle cryocooler, with the in-vacuum electronics thermally isolated from the cold finger to ensure thermal stability. The system demonstrates an average energy resolution of 711 eV at 122 keV, measured using a 57 Co source, and 253 eV at 5.89 keV, measured with 55 Fe across all channels. The readout architecture incorporates a high-performance FPGA paired with a dual-core ARM processor, forming a complete embedded Linux-based computing platform. Communication between the processor and FPGA is handled via memory-mapped I/O, and data are streamed over high-speed gigabit Ethernet. A full-scale 384-pixel Gaia detector, based on this 96-element module, is currently under fabrication.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
NASA NTRS2003

TID Effects of High-Z Material Spot Shields on FPGA Using MPTB Data

An experiment on the Microelectronics and Photonics Test Bed (MPTB) was testing lield programmable gate arrays using spot shields to extend the life of some of the devices being tested. It was expected that the unshielded parts would fail from a total ionizing dose (TID) and yet the opposite occurred. The data show that the devices failing from the TID effects are those with the spot shields attached. This effort is to determine the mechanism by which the environment is interacting with the high-Z material to enhance the TID in these field programmable gate arrays.

Hardage, Donna↗
DOE OSTI2021

First application of a digital mirror Langmuir probe for real-time plasma diagnosis

We report for the first time, a digital Mirror Langmuir Probe (MLP) has successfully sampled plasma temperature, ion saturation current, and floating potential together on a single probe tip in real time in a radio-frequency driven helicon linear plasma device. This is accomplished by feedback control of the bias sweep to ensure a good fit to I–V characteristics with a high frequency, high power digital amplifier, and field-programmable gate array controller. Measurements taken by the MLP were validated by a low speed I–V characteristic manually collected during static plasma conditions. Plasma fluctuations, induced by varying the axial magnetic field($\widetilde{f}$ = 10 Hz), were also successfully monitored with the MLP. Further refinement of the digital MLP pushes it toward a turn-key system that minimizes the time to deployment and lessens the learning curve, positioning the digital MLP as a capable diagnostic for the study of low radio-frequency plasma physics. These demonstrations bolster confidence in fielding such digital MLP diagnostics in magnetic confinement experiments with high spatial and adequate temporal resolution, such as edge plasma, scrape-off layer, and divertor probes.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2022

First application of a digital mirror Langmuir probe for real-time plasma diagnosis

For the first time, a digital Mirror Langmuir probe (MLP) has successfully sampled plasma temperature, ion saturation current, and floating potential together on a single probe tip in real time in a radio-frequency driven helicon linear plasma device. This is accomplished by feedback control of the bias sweep to ensure a good fit to I-V characteristics with a high frequency, high power digital amplifier and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) controller. Measurements taken by the MLP were validated by a low speed I-V characteristic manually collected during static plasma conditions. Plasma fluctuations, induced by varying the axial magnetic field (f̃ = 10 Hz), were also successfully monitored with the MLP. Further refinement of the digital MLP pushes it towards a turn-key system that minimizes the time to deployment and lessens the learning curve, positioning the digital MLP as a capable diagnostic for the study of low radio-frequency plasma physics. These demonstrations bolster confidence in fielding such digital MLP diagnostics in magnetic confinement experiments with high spatial and adequate temporal resolution such as edge plasma, scrape-off layer, and divertor probes.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Development of a Crosstalk Suppression Algorithm for KID Readout

The GroundBIRD telescope aims to detect B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation using the kinetic inductance detector array as a polarimeter. For the readout of the signal from detector array, we have developed a frequency division multiplexing readout system based on a digital down converter method. These techniques in general have the leakage problems caused by the crosstalks. The window function was applied in the field programmable gate arrays to mitigate the effect of these problems and tested it in algorithm level.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

AURORA: Automated Refinement of Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Accelerators

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs), loosely defined as arrays of functional units interconnected through a network-on-chip (NoC), provide higher flexibility than domain-specific ASIC accelerators while offering increased hardware efficiency with respect to fine-grained reconfigurable devices, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Un-fortunately, designing a CGRA for a specific application domain involves enormous software/hardware engineering effort (e.g., designing the CGRA, map operations onto the CGRA, etc) and requires the exploration on a large design space (e.g., applying appropriate loop transformation on each application, specializing the reconfigurable processing elements of the CGRA, refining the network topology, deciding the size of the data memory, etc). Int his paper, we propose AURORA – a software/hardware co-design framework to automatically synthesize optimal CGRA given a set of applications of interest

Tan, Cheng↗
NASA NTRS2006

Functional Recovery of Analog Circuits at Extreme Temperatures

This paper describes a new reconfigurable analog array (RAA) architecture and integrated circuit (IC) used to map analog circuits that can adapt to extreme temperatures under programmable control. Algorithm-driven adaptation takes place on the RAA IC. The algorithms are implemented in a separate Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) IC, co-located with the RAA in the extreme temperature environment. The experiments demonstrate circuit adaptation over a wide temperature range, from extremely low temperature of -180 C to high 120 C.

self-recovery↗
NASA NTRS2006

Temperature-adaptive Circuits on Reconfigurable Analog Arrays

This paper describes a new reconfigurable analog array (MA) architecture and integrated circuit (IC) used to map analog circuits that can adapt to extreme temperatures under programmable control. Algorithm-driven adaptation takes place on the RAA IC. The algorithms are implemented in a separate Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) IC, co-located with the RAA in the extreme temperature environment. The experiments demonstrate circuit adaptation over a wide temperature range, from extremely low temperature of -180 C to high 120 C.

self recovery↗
NASA NTRS2009

Digital Beamforming Scatterometer

This paper discusses scatterometer measurements collected with multi-mode Digital Beamforming Synthetic Aperture Radar (DBSAR) during the SMAP-VEX 2008 campaign. The 2008 SMAP Validation Experiment was conducted to address a number of specific questions related to the soil moisture retrieval algorithms. SMAP-VEX 2008 consisted on a series of aircraft-based.flights conducted on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware in the fall of 2008. Several other instruments participated in the campaign including the Passive Active L-Band System (PALS), the Marshall Airborne Polarimetric Imaging Radiometer (MAPIR), and the Global Positioning System Reflectometer (GPSR). This campaign was the first SMAP Validation Experiment. DBSAR is a multimode radar system developed at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center that combines state-of-the-art radar technologies, on-board processing, and advances in signal processing techniques in order to enable new remote sensing capabilities applicable to Earth science and planetary applications [l]. The instrument can be configured to operate in scatterometer, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), or altimeter mode. The system builds upon the L-band Imaging Scatterometer (LIS) developed as part of the RadSTAR program. The radar is a phased array system designed to fly on the NASA P3 aircraft. The instrument consists of a programmable waveform generator, eight transmit/receive (T/R) channels, a microstrip antenna, and a reconfigurable data acquisition and processor system. Each transmit channel incorporates a digital attenuator, and digital phase shifter that enables amplitude and phase modulation on transmit. The attenuators, phase shifters, and calibration switches are digitally controlled by the radar control card (RCC) on a pulse by pulse basis. The antenna is a corporate fed microstrip patch-array centered at 1.26 GHz with a 20 MHz bandwidth. Although only one feed is used with the present configuration, a provision was made for separate corporate feeds for vertical and horizontal polarization. System upgrades to dual polarization are currently under way. The DBSAR processor is a reconfigurable data acquisition and processor system capable of real-time, high-speed data processing. DBSAR uses an FPGA-based architecture to implement digitally down-conversion, in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) demodulation, and subsequent radar specific algorithms. The core of the processor board consists of an analog-to-digital (AID) section, three Altera Stratix field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), an ARM microcontroller, several memory devices, and an Ethernet interface. The processor also interfaces with a navigation board consisting of a GPS and a MEMS gyro. The processor has been configured to operate in scatterometer, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and altimeter modes. All the modes are based on digital beamforming which is a digital process that generates the far-field beam patterns at various scan angles from voltages sampled in the antenna array. This technique allows steering the received beam and controlling its beam-width and side-lobe. Several beamforming techniques can be implemented each characterized by unique strengths and weaknesses, and each applicable to different measurement scenarios. In Scatterometer mode, the radar is capable to.generate a wide beam or scan a narrow beam on transmit, and to steer the received beam on processing while controlling its beamwidth and side-lobe level. Table I lists some important radar characteristics

Rincon, Rafael F.↗
NASA NTRS2006

Implementation of a Coded Modulation for Deep Space Optical Communications

We present an efficient implementation of a coded modulation for the deep space optical channel. NASA designed this so called serially concatenated pulse position modulation (SCPPM) code to provide an optical link that can operate within one dB signal energy of the Shannon capacity during a nominal mission condition from Mars. Here, we describe some of the challenges in realizing the SCPPM decoder on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Through various architectural optimizations, we achieve a 6 Mbps decoder on a single FPGA. Moreover, we demonstrate that it is possible to communicate reliably on an efficient bits-per-photon count in an end-to-end SCPPM coded system.

turbo codes↗
NASA NTRS2008

Testing Microshutter Arrays Using Commercial FPGA Hardware

NASA is developing micro-shutter arrays for the Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These micro-shutter arrays allow NIRspec to do Multi Object Spectroscopy, a key part of the mission. Each array consists of 62414 individual 100 x 200 micron shutters. These shutters are magnetically opened and held electrostatically. Individual shutters are then programmatically closed using a simple row/column addressing technique. A common approach to provide these data/clock patterns is to use a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Such devices require complex VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) programming and custom electronic hardware. Due to JWST's rapid schedule on the development of the micro-shutters, rapid changes were required to the FPGA code to facilitate new approaches being discovered to optimize the array performance. Such rapid changes simply could not be made using conventional VHDL programming. Subsequently, National Instruments introduced an FPGA product that could be programmed through a Labview interface. Because Labview programming is considerably easier than VHDL programming, this method was adopted and brought success. The software/hardware allowed the rapid change the FPGA code and timely results of new micro-shutter array performance data. As a result, numerous labor hours and money to the project were conserved.

Rapchun, David↗
DOE OSTI2020

GRANT: Ground-Roaming Autonomous Neuromorphic Targeter

In this work we describe the design, implementation, and testing of the first neuromorphic robot capable of obstacle avoidance, grid coverage, and targeting controlled by the second generation Dynamic Adaptive Neural Network Array (DANNA2) digital spiking neuromorphic processor. The simplicity of the DANNA2 processor along with the TENNLab hardware/software co-design framework allows for compact spiking networks that can run efficiently on a small, resource-constrained, platform such as a Xilinx Artix-7 field-programmable gate array. Additionally, we present the dynamic reconfigurability of DANNA2 arrays as a method of realizing complex, multi-objective tasks on hardware that is restricted to relatively small networks.

Ambrose, Jonathan↗