Highly Parallel Sample Rate Converter for Space Telemetry Transmitters

In recent years, following the rapid innovation guidelines of most space agencies, there have been major advances in satellite transmitter technologies. Very high performance standards (e.g., DVB-S2, DVB-S2X and CCSDS 131.2-B-1) have been introduced to maximise link utilisation, while carrier frequencies have moved up into the Ku/Ka bands to increase signal bandwidth. Following these trends, system integrators are also pushing the development of architectures that dynamically change the payload symbol rate, thus changing the bandwidth to cover different mission scenarios, within a single implementation. With these conditions, a solution for dynamically changing the symbol rate can be the use of fractional sampling rate converters (FSRC). In this paper the architecture of a massively parallel FSRC is presented for the case where the backpressure functionality for flow control is missing. Implementation considerations and results are taken for a Xilinx Space-Grade Kintex Ultrascale XQRKU060 considering a DVB-S2 generated signal.