Applying Radiation Hardening by Software to Fast Lossless compression prediction on FPGAs

As scientists endeavor to learn more about the world´s ecosystems, engineers are pushed to develop more sophisticated instruments. With these advancements comes an increase in the amount of data generated. For satellite based instruments the additional data requires sufficient bandwidth be available to transmit the data. Alternatively, compression algorithms can be employed to reduce the bandwidth requirements. This work is motivated by the proposed HyspIRI mission, which includes two imaging spectrometers measuring from visible to short wave infrared (VSWIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) that saturate the projected bandwidth allocations. We present a novel investigation into the capability of using FPGAs integrated with embedded PowerPC processors to adequately perform the predictor function of the Fast Lossless (FL) compression algorithm for multispectral and hyperspectral imagery. Furthermore, our design includes a multi-PowerPC implementation which incorporates recently developed Radiation Hardening by Software (RHBSW) techniques to provide software-based fault tolerance to commercial FPGA devices. Our results show low performance overhead (4-8%) while achieving a speedup of 1.97× when utilizing both PowerPCs. Finally, the evaluation of the proposed system includes resource utilization, performance metrics, and an analysis of the vulnerability to Single Event Upsets (SEU) through the use of a hardware based fault injector.