Design Solutions For Modular Satellite Architectures

The cost-effective access to space envisaged by ESA would open a wide range of new opportunities and markets, but is still many years ahead. There is still a lack of devices, circuits, systems which make possible to develop satellites, ground stations and related services at costs compatible with the budget of academic institutions and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). As soon as the development time and cost of small satellites will fall below a certain threshold (e.g. 100,000 to 500,000 €), appropriate business models will likely develop to ensure a cost-effective and pervasive access to space, and related infrastructures and services. These considerations spurred the activity described in this paper, which is aimed at: - proving the feasibility of low-cost satellites using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) devices. This is a new trend in the space industry, which is not yet fully exploited due to the belief that COTS devices are not reliable enough for this kind of applications; - developing a flight model of a flexible and reliable nano-satellite with less than 25,000€; - training students in the field of avionics space systems: the design here described is developed by a team including undergraduate students working towards their graduation work. The educational aspects include the development of specific new university courses; - developing expertise in the field of low-cost avionic systems, both internally (university staff) and externally (graduated students will bring their expertise in their future work activity); - gather and cluster expertise and resources available inside the university around a common high-tech project; - creating a working group composed of both University and SMEs devoted to the application of commercially available technology to space environment. The first step in this direction was the development of a small low cost nano-satellite, started in the year 2004: the name of this project was PiCPoT (Piccolo Cubo del Politecnico di Torino, Small Cube of Politecnico di Torino). The project was carried out by some departments of the Politecnico, in particular Electronics and Aerospace. The main goal of the project was to evaluate the feasibility of using COTS components in a space project in order to greatly reduce costs; the design exploited internal subsystems modularity to allow reuse and further cost reduction for future missions. Starting from the PiCPoT experience, in 2006 we began a new project called ARaMiS (Speretta et al., 2007) which is the Italian acronym for Modular Architecture for Satellites. This work describes how the architecture of the ARaMiS satellite has been obtained from the lesson learned from our former experience. Moreover we describe satellite operations, giving some details of the major subsystems. This work is composed of two parts. The first one describes the design methodology, solutions and techniques that we used to develop the PiCPoT satellite; it gives an overview of its operations, with some details of the major subsystems. Details on the specifications can also be found in (Del Corso et al., 2007; Passerone et al, 2008). The second part, indeed exploits the experience achieved during the PiCPoT development and describes a proposal for a low-cost modular architecture for satellite

Comparison between cooling strategies for power electronic devices: fractal mini-channels and arrays of impinging submerged jets

Power electronic devices like Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs) and diodes are often characterized by power densities and dimensions that could result in very high heat flux densities. In order to guarantee the expected performance and lifetime for these components, dedicated active cooling devices are usually adopted. In the present paper, the comparison between two different cooling strategies for power electronics is presented: fractal channel design and submerged impinging jets. Each cooling strategy is tested on two different geometrical configurations. Water is used as coolant in all cases. Assessment of the considered cooling methods is done through application of the selected configurations in a simplified system composed by a rectangular chip (heat source) separated from the coolant by a solid block. Three-dimensional conjugated heat transfer simulations are performed by using RANS solver implemented in OpenFOAM and two-equations turbulence models, resolving also the viscous sublayer. Numerical results allow to compare the cooling strategies in terms of maximum chip temperature, overall chip-to-coolant thermal resistance, and pumping power required. In summary, the fractal-channel design shows limitations in guaranteeing low chip temperatures at an affordable pumping power. The submerged impinging jets approach shows very high local heat transfer coefficient by which it is possible to tailor the cooling expect on specific hot spots

Implementation of Self-Timed Circuits onto FPGAs Using Commercial Tools

Asynchronous design has become more and more popular in last years. Many tools and design methodologies have been developed for this kind of circuits. Unfortunately only few of them are focused on their implementation onto FPGAs. Nowadays FPGAs are widespread in many applications and they have enough complexity to allow prototyping also complex designs. For this reason this paper is focused on the implementation of asynchronous-specific blocks on programmable devices using conventional tools and flows. It offers solutions for implementing Müller C elements and delay chains onto FPGAs avoiding unwanted behavior given by the synthesis and the fitting phases. This paper also introduces the solution adopted in our co-design environment to automatically generate delay chains used to single-rail implementation of asynchronous circuits. This is a part of our project which aims at developing a complete framework for producing asynchronous circuits from Simulink models

FR010: Use of FeRAM Devices in a Small Satellite

This paper describes how a ferroelectric RAM from Ramtron has been used to increase the reliability of PiCPoT, a small satellite developed at Politecnico di Torino for educational purposes. It compares the FeRAM solution with respect to a FLASH one. The memories are used for saving housekeeping telemetry data while the satellite is far from the ground station. Due to the intrinsic radiation tolerance and the lower power consumption, FeRAM are very suitable for the applicatio