GR740 Single Board Computer

Cobham Gaisler and RUAG Space are developing a high-performance Single-Board Computer (SBC). The SBC provides substantial processing capability along with an extensive set of memories and redundant interfaces to support the needs of current and future OBC, data handling platforms, and payload data processing. The SBC is developed following the CompactPCI Serial Space backplane standard (CPCI-S.1 R1.0).

The processing capability for the SBC is provided by the GR740 Quad-Core 32-bit LEON4FT SPARC V8 processor along with the Microsemi RTG4 radiation tolerant FPGA. The RTG4 brings the DDR2 memory and high-speed serial link (HSSL) capability to the SBC. The glue-logic required to be compatible with the CPCI-S.1 R1.0 standard are also implemented in the FPGA. More than 70 % of the LUT/Flip-flops and 100 % of the math blocks are still available in the FPGA for application specific developments and implementation of accelerator functions.

With the available processing capability, the following applications are identified as potential use cases for the SBC:
• Image processing and selection of valuable data for earth observation or similar missions
• Visual navigation for critical docking and lander missions, e.g., debris removal, satellite life-extension and lunar and mars missions
• Object identification tracking for surveillance missions
• Centralized payload control and data handling for multiple instruments

The SBC is accompanied by boot software (GRBOOT) and device drivers. The GRBOOT boot software is responsible for taking the GR740 from system reset state to the execution of multi-processor mission application software. The boot SW consists of three parts, multi-processor initialization, processor self-tests, standby mode and application loader. The implementation of the GRBOOT represents a tailoring of the ESA SAVOIR-GS-002 specification "Flight computer initialization sequence". A high-quality implementation of drivers for: GR740 CAN (GRCAN), PCI host (GRPCI2) and SPI (SPICTRL) controllers are available for the GR740 SBC application developer. The drivers are compatible with RTEMS-5 SMP.