QUEENS1 and QUEENS2 research projects

Microprocessors and Digital Systems Laboratory (Microlab) of ECE-NTUA has participated in QUEENS1 and QUEENS2 research projects, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The goal of both projects was the “Quality Assessment of the New European BRAVE FPGA Software Tools”. In particular, the new space-grade FPGAs of NanoXplore, called NG-Medium and NG-Large, were evaluated/tested in QUEENS1 and QUEENS2, respectively.

The main tasks of the projects were the following:

  • (i) the development of a methodology to systematically assess these new FPGAs, examine their correct functionality, explore their capabilities, and evaluate them as solutions for on-board computing in future space missions
  • (ii) the assessment of the software programming tool (for FPGA development and programming), called NXmap, and more specifically, the testing of its settings and functionalities
  • (iii) the testing of the actual hardware (FPGA chip and development board) through benchmarking with circuits of different complexity
  • (iv) the high-performance benchmarking of the FPGAs with algorithms from the Digital Signal Processing and Computer Vision domains.

MicroLab members participated in the projects: Prof. Dimitrios Soudris, Dr George Lentaris, Vasileios Leon, Konstantinos Maragos, Ioannis Stamoulias

Related Publication: V. Leon et. al, “Development and Testing on the European Space-Grade BRAVE FPGAs: Evaluation of NG-Large Using High-Performance DSP Benchmarks”, IEEE Access, 2021

YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8NKV4rpcY4