EUFRATE: a High-Perfomance Reconfigurable Architecture for Radiation-hardened Telecom Payloads

The EUFRATE (EUropean FPGA Radiation-hardened Architecture for TElecommunications) project aims at providing a novel architectural approach based on multiple Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to increase the robustness of electronics involved in Space communication payloads against radiations. This is accomplished by leveraging redundancy and distributed computing. In fact, the cluster of FPGAs is seen as a unique entity exploiting resources abundance with a twofold goal: flexibly introducing radiation mitigation techniques to increase system robustness, while efficiently balancing computation workload to increase computational power and scalability.This architectural approach aims at enabling the usage of non-Space-grade Commercial-of-the-Shelf (COTS) devices in long-life missions planned for harsh radiation environments – such as telecom payloads in the Geostationary Orbit (GEO), thus lowering mission costs while leveraging state-of-the-art performances thanks to an additional layer of protection.In this paper, the hybrid and reusable architectural approach is presented along with the mitigation techniques embedded in the architecture to guarantee reliability. A focus is then provided on the computational section of the architecture, discussing its programmability and performances.