Performance of high-reliability space-qualified processors implementing software defined radios

Abstract

This report provides results of a study of the application to software-defined radios (SDR) of the Maestro 49-tile Radiation-Hard-by-Design multi-processor chip developed by Boeing Corporation for the U.S. Government using DARPA-developed radiation-hard chip technology. The heart of the pipeline SDR architecture is an implementation of single-precision floating-point pipeline FFT. The details of the software architecture to achieve the pipeline operation are presented. The performance of N-point FFTs for N = 128, 256, 512, 1024, and 2048 is reported as number of processor tiles is increased. Maximum FFT throughput achieved for a 2048-point FFT is 27 million samples per second when 20 of the 49 available tiles are used for separate FFT blocks, one tile is used for input data distribution, and one tile is used for output data collection. The performance of the complete SDR is projected based upon the FFT experiments.