Fault tolerant design of large-scale digital beam forming in SRAM-FPGAs for software defined satellite platforms

Large scale digital beamforming (LS-DBFs) are widely used in satellite communications for spectrum reuse and transmission enhancement. SRAM-FPGAs are a popular option for software defined satellite platforms due to their rich computation resources and high flexibility. However, they are sensitive to soft errors, which limit their application in space. This paper discusses the application of coding based fault tolerance schemes for the protection of LS-DBFs on software defined payloads. Since multiple FPGAs are usually needed to support the whole LS-DBFs system, different decomposition schemes are compared in terms of resource efficiency and reliability when the coding based scheme is applied to protect the DBFs on a FPGA. Theoretical analysis and hardware experiments shows that resource efficiency and reliability are a pair of contradictory requirements for decomposition schemes. The protection with vertical decomposition could improve the reliability by 96% with 1.5× redundancy. And the protection with horizontal decomposition could improve the reliability by 85% with 1.2× redundancy.