Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Hi-SIDE (High-Speed Integrated Satellite Data Systems For Leading EU Industry)
Reporting period: 2020-04-01 to 2022-06-30
The European and world-wide trend is to mature application-oriented technologies in the domains of Earth observation (EO), satellite navigation and satellite communications, which are facing a steady increase of performance. These growing mission requirements need an answer at system and equipment level by further miniaturisation, integration and break-through of data handling technologies. The Hi-SIDE project aimed to assist in this mission by developing a suite of integrated technologies for the high-speed management, processing, and transfer of large amounts satellite data, such as the data collected by Earth Observation satellites.
The specific objectives of Hi-SIDE were to design new high speed data management systems including on-board payload data-processing technology, on-board high-speed data storage, adaptive, reconfigurable, multi-Gbit/s inter-spacecraft data transfer and downlink systems, on-board data compression systems and adaptive data reduction techniques and a high-performance on-board network technology, and to integrate and demonstrate these systems in an end to end data chain supporting an input data-rate from instruments of 50 Gbps and an output data-rate to the downlink of 10 Gbit/s.
The project made substantial advances in the performance of individual components of the data chain, including the development of: a high-performance, high-reliability and high-availability network to interconnect the data chain elements, a modular data compression system which can process the very high instrument data rates foreseen for future EO missions, a high performance very versatile payload processing unit that can be programmed on the fly, in 40us; a high-rate RF downlink transmitter is used for high speed data transmission from earth observation or data relay satellites to the ground and an optical terminal system that supports high speed data links and optical downlinks.
Whilst these individual advances represent significant improvements to current satellite payload technologies, Hi-SIDEs main innovation is the delivery of a complete data chain architecture to handle an aggregate instrument data-rate of at least 50 Gbps in the near term, together with a roadmap to achieve even higher performance in the future.
The main outcomes and achievements of this work project are 11 new and 2 enhanced satellite products:
• Network
• Interfaces
• An HPDP processing element that can reach a theoretical maximum of 10GOPS per second. The element can be further expanded using multiple boards in series and reach a multiple figure.
• A data compression unit implementing advanced and efficient on-board data compression and other adaptive data reduction techniques with a processing data-rate of 5 Gbit/s at the input, compression algorithm CCSDS 123.1-B and image compression.
• A RF Downlink operating at 26 GHz supporting advanced encoding and modulation schemes and downlink data rate of 10 Gbit/s (with two channels using dual polarization antenna each operating at 5 Gbit/s).
• A Ka band power amplifier designed for 25.5-27 GHz using Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors. This design provides a downlink signal with 2W of RF power.
• A V12 demodulator offering full bandwidth exploitation in Ka-band by a symbol rate up to 2 x 1200 Ms/s, for an aggregate bitrate of greater than 10 Gbit/s.
• A multigigabit optical downlink for data being transported over the SpaceFibre network and processed by the on-board equipment. It features a maximum user throughput of 7.6 Gbit/s for the SpaceFibre interface whereas the data processing chain achieves 8.9 Gbit/s throughput for an achieved downlink at 10 Gbit/s.
• A Gold Reference Software implementation of CCSDS-123.0-B-2 suitable for cross-verification for software implementations.
• A state-of-the-art Hyperspectral Image Compressor based on a parallel implementation of CCSDS 123.0-B-2 with the new Hybrid Encoder
The project delivered the following impacts:
• New high-speed data chain sub systems and supporting technologies for data intensive next generation Telecommunications and Earth observation systems.
• Translation of research results into flight products through exploitation of the project results
• Accelerating and broadening technology transfer through close collaboration between academic and commercial partners.