General-purpose dual-core (MCU + FPGA) on-board computer for satellite and CubeSat missions with flight-proven heritage.
ABACUS On-Board Computer
General-purpose dual-core (MCU + FPGA) on-board computer for satellite and CubeSat missions with flight-proven heritage.
Description
ABACUS is an OBC (On-Board Computer) subsystem with a general-purpose hardware platform, suited for a wide range of satellite and CubeSat missions. It is designed to be flexible and scalable in terms of processing power, with the goal of maintaining very low power consumption. The two cores (MCU MSP430 and FPGA Spartan-3E, interconnected via a 24-line bus) offer many operating modalities (e.g. Master/Slave or multi-Master), and the FPGA offers all the advantages of RTL coding for implementing specific tasks (e.g. attitude control) or generic systems, including third-party IP cores. With the FPGA, high reliability may be achieved using triple modular redundancy (TMR) configuration codes. Several embedded sensors provide health monitoring and attitude control data (3-axis magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope). The system design offers the possibility to reconfigure the FPGA code and MCU firmware in flight. ABACUS has reached more than six years of continuous flight heritage on UniSat-6, TigriSat and UniSat-7.
Specifications
| Cores | Two cores (MCU MSP430 and FPGA Spartan-3E) directly interconnected with a 24-line bus |
|---|---|
| Mcu | MSP430 EP series, 16-bit RISC MCU, up to 25 MHz, HiRel Enhanced Product (Texas Instruments) |
| Analog i/o | 10x 3.3 V analog input; up to 45x digital GPIO channels |
| Gpio | 16x voltage-level-shiftable GPIOs with interrupt features |
| Com ports | 4x COM ports (one also RS422/485, Full or Half Duplex) |
| Bus interfaces | 2x I2C and 1x SPI bus |
| FPGA | Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA, RAM based core, 500K gates |
| FPGA gpio | 34x GPIO (usable as LVDS) and 8x GPI channels |
| FPGA clock | 25 MHz or 100 MHz (default) |
| Memory | Embedded 16Mb (2 MB) SRAM for FPGA; 2x 16 MB flash NOR memories |
| Reprogrammability | FPGA and MCU reprogrammable from ground |
| IMU | Embedded 3-axis magnetometer, accelerometer and gyroscope |
| Sensors | 3x temperature sensors, 1x drawn current monitor |
| Rtc | Embedded RTC |
| Mass | 59 g |
| Form factor | PC/104 CubeSat form factor compatible |
| Power consumption | 50 mW (FPGA OFF, MCU ON, recording sensor data) |
| Power input | 5 V satellite bus |
| Components grade | Off the shelf industrial / automotive |
| Operating temperature | -40C to +85C |
| Flight heritage | UniCubeSat-GG (2012), UniSat-5 (2013), UniSat-6 (2014), TigriSat (2014), Serpens (2015), UniSat-7 - 6+ years continuous flight heritage |
| TRL | 9 (flight-proven) |
