Design of a Highly Integrated and Reliable SDR Platform for Multiple RF Applications on Spacecrafts

The utilization of Software-Defined Radios (SDR) has already become state-of-the-art for terrestrial Radio Frequency (RF) and wireless applications. The almost conservative space industry also identified the benefits of reconfigurable radio systems and uses SDRs on satellites and space vehicles. The traditional definition of a software-defined radio thereby is the digital implementation of applications in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) or Digital Signal Processors (DSP). The analog parts (e.g. RF components) of the radio are generally tailored to the application specification and are not, or only partly, configurable. With the release of programmable and reconfigurable Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC), a new era of SDRs was declared, which allows more flexibility and higher performance into smaller dimension. Thus, making these benefits available for applications on spacecraft has been identified as a big challenge, since those technologies are not designed for the harsh environmental conditions in space. This paper presents an approach for a highly integrated and reliable Generic Software Defined-Radio (GSDR) platform design and the results of a pre-evaluation test under radiation conditions on a prototype, to investigate certain mitigation techniques and a preconceived selection of system components. Focus of this platform is the integration into a satellite system, in order to operate multiple RF and wireless communication applications, where typically specific units for each application are used.