A high-density, non-volatile mass-memory and data formatting solution for space applications

The Instrument Storage Module was designed to provide a single-board path from a satellite's instruments to its transmitter. It is equipped with custom interfaces to the instrument, CCSDS formatting algorithms implemented in an FPGA, mass-memory storage, and a direct X-Band or Ku-Band transmitter output interface. In order to pinpoint and eliminate any bottlenecks in maintaining a continuous 150 Mbps downlink rate, we have studied the bandwidth of individual component blocks in the data flow and present the results in this article. Our analysis consists of FPGA simulation, FPGA timing design, and board layout timing analysis. The results indicate that the output to the transmitter is capable of continuous downlink of up to 168 Mbps (Section 3), providing 12% margin over the downlink requirement (limited primarily by the serializing algorithms in the FPGA).