Speakers
Description
The Photospheric Magnetic Field Imager (PMI) will be one of the payload instruments on board the European Space Agency (ESA) VIGIL mission. It will provide vector magnetograms and tachograms of the solar photospheric plasma as valuable information for being used in space weather diagnostics.
The PMI instrument consists of an Electronics Unit and an Optics Unit, which are connected through a harness. The Electronics Unit contains a specialized Digital Processing Unit (DPU), which integrates a System Controller (SyC), implemented in a GR712 processor, and a Main Processing Unit (MPU), based on a Space-Grade AMD Kintex™ UltraScale™ XQR FPGA. The DPU also includes various memories and external interfaces.
The telemetry limitations of the mission, located at 1 au at the L5 Lagrange point, the requirement for continuous 24/7 monitoring of the Sun photospheric vector magnetic field and line-of-sight velocity, and the need for low-latency (25 min) and high-cadence (30 min) data products drive the implementation of a sophisticated onboard data reduction process. Additionally, partial scientific analysis is also performed onboard to minimize the size of the data products.
Only for its nominal observational mode, PMI uses 19.33 Gbit of data every 30 min, consisting of 24 images (four polarization states at six wavelengths) with a resolution of 2048 × 2048 pixels and a depth of 12 bits per pixel. Each image is formed by accumulating 16 camera frames during the initial processing stage. Through onboard processing, this data volume is significantly reduced to around 100 Mbit per dataset. The final dataset includes 5 maps (B, γ, φ, vLOS, and Ic) at 2048 × 2048 px resolution at a maximum of 6 bit per pixel, along with a Low Polarization Mask image, at 2048 × 2048 resolution at 1 bit per pixel.
To achieve this functionality, the FPGA-based MPU is responsible for high-performance data processing and reconfigurability, efficiently executing key tasks such as data accumulation, pre-processing, processing, compression, and storage in external memory. The GR712 processor, acting as the SyC, oversees system control and handles communication with the spacecraft.
In summary, we present how the next generation of Xilinx devices for deep space can provide great computing capabilities, simplifying the PMI DPU design without compromising its performance.
Affiliation of author(s)
Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), Spanish Space Solar Physics Consortium and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)
| Track | FPGAs: High Performance |
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