OBC-NG: Towards a reconfigurable on-board computing architecture for spacecraft

The computational demands on spacecraft are rapidly increasing. Current on-board computing components and architectures cannot keep up with the growing requirements. Only a small selection of space-qualified processors and FPGAs are available and current architectures stick with the inflexible cold-redundant structure. The objective of the ongoing project OBC-NG (On-board Computer - Next Generation) is to find new concepts for on-board-computer to fulfill future requirements. The concept presented in this paper is based on a distributed reconfigurable system, consisting of different nodes for processing, management and interface operations. OBC-NG will exploit the high performance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware parts. To compensate the shortcomings of COTS parts the OBC-NG redundancy approach differs from the classic way and error mitigation techniques will work mainly on software level. This paper discusses the hardware and software architecture of the system as well as the redundancy and reconfiguration concept. Our ideas will be proven in an OBC-NG prototype, planned for the next year.