A Hybrid-FPGA System for On-Board Data Processing Targeting the MATMOS FTIR Instrument

The MATMOS Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer is one of three scientific instruments on the previously proposed MARVEL mission. MATMOS requires computationally intensive floating-point signal processing to reduce the amount of data prior to downlink. With the goal of reducing design time and the size and weight of instrument electronics, this paper presents an FTIR spectrometry implementation targeting the Xilinx Virtex-4FX hybrid-FPGA and its embedded PowerPC 405 processor. We explore different hardware and software optimizations and architectural configurations of the hybrid-FPGA system to demonstrate optimal performance in onboard data processing. By including a dedicated floating point unit and dot-product co-processor in the hardware as well as utilizing optimized single-precision math library functions and a modified IBM PowerPC performance library in the software, we demonstrate a more than 8x reduction in execution time compared to the non-optimized software only implementation. A dual-processor design concept as an enhancement that would further reduce the execution time is also presented.