BRAVE NG-MEDIUM FPGA reconfiguration through SpaceWire: example use case and performance analysis

On-board reconfiguration of FPGAs on a spacecraft offers the important advantage of allowing the reuse of the same hardware component for different functionalities during a mission. To be able to benefit from these features, a solution to cope with the challenges of using SRAMbased FPGAs in a radiation environment is required, and at the same time it is desired that the FPGA reconfiguration takes place at high speed. The BRAVE NG-MEDIUM FPGA offers a solution for this problem, by combining being radiation-hardened by design and reconfiguration of the programmable logic via a high-speed communication protocol, namely SpaceWire. In this paper we compare the performance of SpaceWire with Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) for NG-MEDIUM reconfiguration, in terms of the time elapsed when uploading a bitstream file from a Central Processing Unit (in our case from a computer) to the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and the time needed for uploading such bitstream and configuring the FPGA with the uploaded bitstream.