COSMIAC CubeSat Reconfigurable Board (CCRB)

A compact, reconfigurable FPGA board is a useful resource for CubeSat developers. COSMIAC is developing a low-power FPGA board with a small footprint 70mm x 70mm, called the COSMIAC CubeSat FPGA Board (CCFB). This board is Space Plug-and-Play Architecture (SPA) compliant. The CCRB contains all functinality required for SPA - U and SPA - I interfacing.

The CCRB solution consists of three boards:

	The Xilinx Spartan-based FPGA Board (CCRB-FB);
	The Power Board (CCRB-PB) which accepts a 5V input and generates the regulated voltages required by the FPGA Board; and
	The Application Board (CCRB-AB) which is a mission-specific sensor daughter card that plugs directly in to the FPGA Board. There are currently two CCRB-AB platforms available. The first is for optical sensing and the second is for Software Defined Radio.

The present FPGA Board is designed around the Xilinx Spartan-3A FPGA. A future iteration of the Board is expected to be designed around the Xilinx Spartan-6 device.

The Application Board is a daughter card that contains the common interfaces to a variety of sensors. The Application Board was designed with reuse in mind and can rapidly be adapted to support various sensors, such as high resolution optical imagers or Software Defined Radios developed through the CubeFlow framework.

Please contact COSMIAC if you are interested in obtaining or using copies of the CCRB, or if you desire more information related to SPA, Optical Sensing or SDR.

Shown below is the latest version of the CCRB and the associated software Defined Radio board combination. The FPGA board can be used in conjunction with a daughter card or as a stand alone unit.