Radiation Hardened High Speed Digitizer

Los Alamos National Laboratory has designed and demonstrated a space-flight quality digitizer board with a CompactPCI interface in the popular 6U form factor. The digitizer board is designed to meet the requirements of missions requiring true space-grade radiation tolerance in geosynchronous orbits. It has four 12-bit input channels, four 8-bit input channels, and can digitize input waveforms at speeds up to 2 giga samples per second. It has a reconfigurable radiation tolerant FPGA for on-orbit waveform processing and a 20 Mbyte memory for waveform storage. This module can capture data from sensors in space and analyze that data on-orbit before sending the resulting information back to Earth. This capability enables high-speed waveforms to be collected in space and analyzed in real-time. Immediate applications include direct conversion software defined radio receivers, radars, transient waveform recorders, and other space-based high fidelity data-capture and analysis applications.