ESA Open Invitation to Tender AO10240
Open Date: 14/10/2020
Closing Date: 15/01/2021 13:00:00

Status: ISSUED
Reference Nr.: 20.1TT.54
Prog. Ref.: CC-AT 4.0.1
Budget Ref.: E/0534-01G – CC-AT 4.0.1
Special Prov.: BE+DK+FR+DE+IT+NL+ES+SE+CH+GB+IE+AT+NO+FI+PT+GR+LU+CZ+RO+CA+HU+PL
Tender Type: C
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Products: Satellites & Probes / RF / Microwave Communication (Platform and Payloads) / „Communication – BB (Antennas excluded)” / Other
Technology Domains: RF Systems, Payloads and Technologies / RF Technologies and Equipment / RF Devices
Establishment: ESTEC
Directorate: Directorate Telecom & Integrated Applica
Department: Telecom Technologies,Product&Systems Dep
Division: Technologies and Products Division
Contract Officer: Dorval, Nathalie
Industrial Policy Measure: C2 – Activities in open competition, significant partecipat…
Last Update Date: 14/10/2020
Update Reason: Tender issue

Objective: The objective of the activity is to develop, implement and test radiation hardening techniques to mitigate the impact oftemporal and permanent radiation-induced faults, enabling the use of commercial-off-the-shelf Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)in geostationary telecommunication satellites. Targeted Improvements: Enable the use of COTS FPGA’s for on-board telecommunicationpayload applications in geostationary satellites. Description: The use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) digital programmable components in space is a growing trend that seeks to improve the system performance by using state-of-the-art FPGAs and digital signal processors, whilst at the same time reducing the parts cost. Although the use of COTS FPGAs is already a reality for Earth observationandscientific missions in low Earth orbit, geostationary telecommunication missions are faced with a longer mission lifetime and amoresevere radiation environment, and still rely on radiation-hard FPGA components. The use of COTS components would enable higherperformance and more cost effective systems, but would require more complex radiation mitigation techniques to achieve sufficient reliability and availability. The number of FPGA devices used in a digital payload typically increases with increasing payload complexity. This opens up the possibility of treating multiple FPGAs as a distributed cluster, instead of a collection of individual devices, and hence the possibility to implement mitigation techniques at cluster level. This activity will evaluate different radiationmitigation techniques for both permanent and temporal radiation effects in state-of-the-art COTS FPGA devices, both at individual device level and at cluster level. The proposed mitigation strategies shall be analysed and the associated performance versus radiation mitigation trade-off presented. A representative test vehicle with COTS FPGAs will be designed and radiation tested to validate the developed hardening techniques and to quantify the performance trade-offs. The developed mitigation techniques shall be published and madeavailable to all ESA Member State industries.Procurement Policy: C2: Activities are in open competition, where a significant participation of non-LSIs is requested. For additional information please go to EMITS news „Industrial Policy measures for non-primes, SMEs and RD entities in ESA programmes”.