An fpga-based risc-v computer architecture orbital laboratory on a pocketqube satellite

Satellite on-board electronics is subject to sever operating conditions mainly due to the presence of cosmic radiations. This work illustrate the design of a computer board based on FPGA device, devoted to study the resilience of different soft-processor micro-architectures in such a harsh operating environment. The soft-processor cores are fully compliant with the RISC-V RV32I instruction set and are implemented on an ARTIX-7 A100 FPGA. Presently, four variants of the processor core are ready to be used in the on-board computer of a PocketQube satellite and have been extensively verified by fault injection simulations. Here we illustrate the first processor cores that will be implemented along with the system architecture that will be set up on the satellite.