International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / NASA’s use of high bandwidth packetized Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) telemetry in future missions presents a great challenge to ground data system developers. These missions, including the Earth Observing System (EOS), call for high data rate interfaces and small packet sizes. Because each packet requires a similar amount of protocol processing, high data rates and small packet sizes dramatically increase the real-time workload on ground packet processing systems. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been developing packet processing subsystems for more than twelve years. Implementations of these subsystems have ranged from mini-computers to single-card VLSI multiprocessor subsystems. The latter subsystem, known as the VLSI Packet Processor, was first deployed in 1991 for use in support of the Solar Anomalous & Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) mission. An upgraded version of this VMEBus card, first deployed for Space Station flight hardware verification, has demonstrated sustained throughput of up to 50 Megabits per second and 15,000 packets per second. Future space missions including EOS will require significantly higher data and packet rate performance. A new approach to packet processing is under development that will not only increase performance levels by at least a factor of six but also reduce subsystem replication costs by a factor of five. This paper will discuss the development of a next generation packet processing subsystem and the architectural changes necessary to achieve a thirty-fold improvement in the performance/price of real-time packet processing.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / GSFC in keeping with the tenets of NASA has been aggressively investigating new technologies for spacecraft and ground communications and processing. The application of these technologies, together with standardized telemetry formats, make it possible to build systems that provide high-performance at low cost in a short development cycle. The High Rate Telemetry Acquisition System (HRTAS) Prototype is one such effort that has validated Goddard's push towards faster, better and cheaper. The HRTAS system architecture is based on the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus and VLSI Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). These ASICs perform frame synchronization, bit-transition density decoding, cyclic redundancy code (CRC) error checking, Reed-Solomon error detection/correction, data unit sorting, packet extraction, annotation and other service processing. This processing in performed at rates of up to and greater than 150 Mbps sustained using a high-end performance workstation running standard UNIX O/S, (DEC 4100 with DEC UNIX or better). ASICs are also used for the digital reception of Intermediate Frequency (IF) telemetry as well as the spacecraft command interface for commands and data simulations. To improve the efficiency of the back-end processing, the level zero processing sorting element is being developed. This will provide a complete hardware solution to extracting and sorting source data units and making these available in separate files on a remote disk system. Research is on going to extend this development to higher levels of the science data processing pipeline. The fact that level 1 and higher processing is instrument dependent; an acceleration approach utilizing ASICs is not feasible. The advent of field programmable gate array (FPGA) based computing, referred to as adaptive or reconfigurable computing, provides a processing performance close to ASIC levels while maintaining much of the programmability of traditional microprocessor based systems. This adaptive computing paradigm has been successfully demonstrated and its cost performance validated, to make it a viable technology for the level one and higher processing element for the HRTAS. Higher levels of processing are defined as the extraction of useful information from source telemetry data. This information has to be made available to the science data user in a very short period of time. This paper will describe this low cost solution for high rate data processing at level one and higher processing levels. The paper will further discuss the cost-benefit of this technology in terms of cost, schedule, reliability and performance.