M. Tonarelli

Radiation Tolerant SpaceWire Router for Satellite On-Board Networking

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently proposed the space wire standard for reliable satellite on-board networking at high speeds. This paper presents the design of configurable space wire router and interface hardware macrocells, the first in state-of-the-art compliant with the latest standard extensions, protocol identification and remote memory access protocol. The space wire router with 8 links achieves 100 Mbits/s data rate with 135 W power consumption and 300 Krad radiation tolerance. These performances meet the requirements of planned ESA space missions

Intelligent sensor interface for automotive applications

This paper presents a new platform for interfacing a generic sensor for automotive applications, called ISIF (Intelligent Sensor InterFace). Such platform consists in a wide set of optimized high performance analog, digital and software IPs for various kind of sensors. These IPs can be extracted for fast prototyping accurate and reliable interface circuits for the target automotive application. Therefore the main advantage of this platform-based design approach is to give the possibility to bring up complex and ad-hoc sensor conditioning systems, reducing development risks, design effort, power consumption, costs and time-to-market.

FPGA-based networking systems for high data-rate and reliable in-vehicle communications

The amount of electronic systems introduced in vehicles is continuously increasing: X-by-wire, complex electronic control systems and above all future applications such as automotive vision and safety warnings require in-car reliable communication backbones with the capability to handle large amount of data at high speeds. To cope with this issue and driven by the experience of aerospace systems, the SpaceWire standard, recently proposed by the European space agency (ESA), can be introduced in the automotive field. The SpaceWire is a serial data link standard which provides safety and redundancy and guarantees to handle data-rates up to hundreds of Mbps. This paper presents the design of configurable SpaceWire router and interface hardware macrocells, the first in state of the art compliant with the newest standard extensions, Protocol Identification (PID) and remote memory access protocol (RMAP). The macrocells have been integrated and tested on antifuse technology in the framework of an ESA project. The achieved performances of a router with 8 links, 130 Mbps data-rate, 1.5 W power cost, meet the requirements of future automotive electronic systems. The proposed networking solution simplifies the connectivity, reducing also the relevant volume and mass budgets, provides network safety and redundancy and guarantees to handle very high bandwidth data flows not covered by current standards as CAN or FlexRay

A mixed-signal embedded platform for automotive sensor conditioning

A mixed-signal embedded system called Intelligent Sensor InterFace (ISIF) suited to fast identify, trim, and verify an architecture to interface a given sensor is presented. This system has been developed according to a platform-based design approach, a methodology that has proved to be efficient for building complex mixed-signal embedded systems with short time-to-market. Such platform consists in a wide set of optimized high-performance analog, digital, and software intellectual property (IP) modules for various kinds of sensors. These IPs can be easily defined for fast prototyping of the interface circuit for the given sensor. Final ASIC implementation for the given sensor conditioning can be easily derived with reduced risk and short development time. Some case examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of this system.

Low-g accelerometer fast prototyping for automotive applications

This paper presents an application of the ISIF chip (intelligent sensor interface), for conditioning a dual-axis low-g accelerometer in MEMS technology. MEMS are nowadays the standard in automotive applications (and not only), as they feature a drastic reduction in cost, area and power, while they require a more complex electronic interface with respect to traditional discrete devices. ISIF is a platform on chip implementation, aiming to fast prototype a wide range of automotive sensors thanks to its high configuration resources, achieved both by full analog / digital IPs trimming options and by flexible routing structures. This accelerometer implementation exploits a relevant part of ISIF hardware resources, but also requires signal processing add-ins (software emulation of digital DSP blocks) for the closed loop conditioning architecture and for performance improvement (for example temperature drift compensation). In spite the short prototyping time, the resulting system achieves good performances with respect to commercial devices, featuring a 0.9 mg/radicHz noise density with 1024 LSB/g sensitivity on the digital output over a +/- 2g FS, and an offset drift over 100degC range within 30 mg, with 2% of FS sensitivity drift. Miniboards have been developed as product prototypes, consisting of a small PCB with ISIF and accelerometer dies bonded together, firmware embedded in EEPROM and communication transceivers

Experiencing with AMR sensor conditioning in automotive field

AMR (anisotropic magnetoresistive) sensors are versatile sensors which can be used in a wide range of automotive applications. This paper presents the development of an AMR sensor interface prototype based on the intelligent sensor interface (ISIF) and designed following the platform based design flow. The ISIF is composed by an analog front-end and a digital section. The analog section performs signal acquisition and provides stimuli to the sensor, while the digital section provides digital signal processing IPs (intellectual properties) and a 32-bit RISC (reduced instruction set) DSP (digital signal processor) for important software routines of signal processing, calibration and temperature compensation. An AMR commercial sensor, used for linear position measurement, has been chosen as case study for the verification of the overall interface prototype. Finally, system test results and performances are presented.

Mitigating Radiation Effects on ICs at Device and Architectural Levels: the SpaceWire Router Case Study

The mitigation of radiation effects on integrated circuits is discussed in this paper with reference to the design of hardware macrocells for reliable high-speed networking based on the SpaceWire standard target applications include on-board distributed control systems for aerospace, military, avionics or automotive scenarios. Due to CMOS technology scaling, digital ICs are becoming more susceptible to radiation effects, both total ionization dose and single event effects. This traditional issue of space and military systems is becoming a concern also for terrestrial electronic systems such as commercial avionics, high-radiation industrial environments and safety-critical automotive control systems. To optimize the trade-off between increased radiation- robustness and extra IC costs in terms of area, power consumption and weight, we present several ad-hoc design solutions both at device and architectural levels. As a result a single-device SpaceWire Router with 8 links and data-rates up to 100 Mbits/s is achieved featuring a TID of 300 krad and immunity to upset up to a linear energy transfer threshold greater than 60 MeV mg/cm2.

Router IP macrocell for radiation tolerant SpaceWire Networking

New scientific missions require the capability to handle large amount of data for Earth observation, atmospheric sounding, planetary exploration. The European Space Agency recently proposed a serial data link standard, the SpaceWire (ECSS-E-50-12A), to facilitate the set up of onboard high-speed and reliable networks, to reduce system integration costs, to promote compatibility between equipment and to encourage the re-use of digital interfaces across different missions. To this aim this paper presents the VLSI design of configurable SpaceWire router and interface IP cores, the first in state-of-the-art compliant with the newest standard extensions protocol identifier and remote memory access protocol. The IP cells have been integrated and tested on radiation-tolerant antifuse FPGA device by Actel, in the framework of an ESA space project. The achieved performances of 8 SpaceWire links routing, 100 Mbits/s data-rate, 1.2 W power consumption, 300 Krad radiation tolerance meet the requirements of planned ESA space missions. The proposed SpaceWire IPs simplify the on board connectivity, provide network redundancy and guarantee to handle very high bandwidth data flows