Chevin Technology, Alpha-Data & Correct Designs collaborate to deliver fast and secure data offload for NASA-JPL's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3 (AVIRIS-3)

Using Chevin’s Ethernet IP Cores to enable faster data transfer from FPGAs

September 12, 2024 -- NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been running the AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer) project for over 30 years, using a family of ever-advancing JPL imaging spectrometers (AVIRIS Classic, AVIRIS-Next Generation, AVIRIS-3, and soon AVIRIS-5) (https://avirisng.jpl.nasa.gov/planned_campaigns.html). The objective of current state-of-the-art AVIRIS-3 is to identify, measure, and monitor constituents of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere for NASA science and applications and to prepare for a future global imaging spectrometer mission called SBG-VSWIR (Surface Biology and Geology-Very Short Wave Infrared).

AVIRIS-3 data contains 1240 cross track pixels with 328 spectral wavelengths allowing it to cover a wide spectral range between 390 nm and 2510 nm with a spectral sampling interval of 7.5 nm and field-of-view of 39.5 degrees. The equipment is mounted in an aircraft and is flown over the target area between 4 – 20 km from the ground. From the survey data detailed images of the Earth’s surface are created, revealing the properties of terrestrial vegetation, aquatic ecosystems, mineral/soils, snow/ice environments and gases in the atmosphere. This new spectroscopically derived information is used to advance science knowledge of our changing planet and provide new critical information for decision makers.

Data Transfer Speeds and the FPGA Challenge

The JPL imaging spectrometers technology has been constantly updated to provide higher-quality data and information. This means increasingly large amounts of data are collected as the imaging spectrometer instrumentation advances. AVIRIS-3 can collect up to 2 terabytes per day. As a result, the amount of data to be transferred from the spectrometers to the airborne flight computer has increased. In addition, JPL science operators needed to view the data in real-time with the FlightView software (https://github.com/nasa-jpl/FlightView/tree/master), however the weight, complexity and cost of the existing Full Camera Link data transfer were becoming problematic.

JPL looked to replace the existing system, including transceiver, data cables and dedicated hardware that used Camera Link protocols, with standard 10GbE fibreoptic and network card. To enable this, they chose to use the Alpha Data ADM-VPX3-9Z2 with AMD Zynq UltraScale Plus MPSoC. This 3U VPX format board includes VITA 66 fiber-optic connectivity, enabling data to be sent over 10GbE UDP/IP, and this is where Chevin Technology collaborated with Alpha-Data, Correct Designs and JPL.

AVIRIS-3 installed on a Beechcraft Super King Air B200

Chevin’s FPGA IP solution

Chevin Technology is a long-time partner of Alpha-Data, providing their customers with high-performance low-latency Ethernet IP solutions for FPGAs. For this collaboration, Alpha-Data wanted to scale-up the system performance, moving from Full CameraLink to 10Gbit Fiber optic Ethernet, ensuring this could be done quickly and reliably, without seriously impacting the project delivery timescales. Integrating a UDP offload engine from Chevin Technology was an attractive solution that offered a far shorter time to market and significant risk and cost advantages. In addition, resource usage for UDP (12k LUTs) and the MAC Chevin IP (6k LUTs), is compact compared to other solutions, offers lower latency, handles very high load without packet loss and provides idle insertions and deletions tracking and other diagnostics.

Chevin Technology collaborated with Alpha-Data, providing consulting services to assist with integration of the MAC & UDP offload engine onto the target FPGA, including an application interface that was specific to JPL’s requirements so that data could be received, verified and checked for integrity using the RTP protocol. Chevin Technology collaborated with Correct Designs for the simulation and hardware verification of the UDP and MAC engine on Alpha Data Hardware.

System integrity was addressed with patented technology, ChevinID, which verifies the identity of the hardware and functions running on it. This ensured that the design worked as intended and that the logic could not be compromised or copied by unauthorised actors.

Beechcraft Super King Air B200 with AVIRIS-3 coming out of the Atlantic Aviation hangar, Burbank, CA, USA​

The collaboration between Alpha-Data, Correct Designs and Chevin Technology, resulted in a timely, successful delivery of a tested and working solution to JPL, within the agreed time frame.

“Utilising the Chevin Technology IP allowed Alpha-Data to significantly upgrade the performance of the sensor capture framework deployed on the rugged ADM-VPX3-9Z2 MPSoC platform. The comprehensive support and consultancy service from Chevin helped rapid deployment and delivery of the upgrade that replaced multi-lane LVDS output with 10GbE, ” said Andrew McCormick, Technical Director/ CTO, Alpha Data.

Results

JPL extensively tested the FPGA solution in the lab, demonstrating the transfer and storage of 15,362,516 spectral images (12.9 Terabytes) or 8.56 billion RTP Ethernet packages without a single RTP packet loss. They then moved on to airborne testing with verification of the RTP Ethernet technology for the imaging Spectrometer using the AVIRIS-3 instrument on Beechcraft Super King Air 200 (twin-turboprop) for flights in the Satellite Coastal and Oceanic Atmospheric Pollution Experiment-II (SCOAPE-II) campaigns, as well as measurements over Cuprite Hills, NV, USA and the Sacramento Bay Delta, CA, USA.

The Chevin Technology RTP Ethernet Fiber optic provides JPL with a solution that is compatible with standard Fiber optic Ethernet networking equipment and provides full ground isolation, as well as a path to scale to higher data rates. It delivers significant advantages in speed, weight, complexity and cost compared to using the legacy Full CameraLink solutions.

Together, JPL, Alpha-Data, Correct Designs and Chevin Technology developed a secure, reliable and scalable solution within an ambitious time frame.

References

https://avirisng.jpl.nasa.gov/planned_campaigns.html

Adam Chlus et al., “Airborne Visible / Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3 (AVIRIS-3): Initial Results and Applications” In proceedings of American Geophysical Union.2023, San Francisco, 11-15 December2023

Regina Eckert et al., “AVIRIS-3: NEXT-GENERATION AIRBORNE IMAGING SPECTROSCOPY CALIBRATION AND FIRST RESULTS” In Proceedings of 2024 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 7-12 July 2024, Athens, Greece

Alpha Data ADM-VPX3-9Z2 https://www.alpha-data.com/product/adm-vpx3-9z2/

Chevin Technology https://www.chevintechnology.com/ethernet-ip/udp-ip/

Correct Designs https://correctdesigns.com/

Satellite Coastal and Oceanic Atmospheric Pollution Experiment-II (SCOAPE-II) campaigns ( https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/acd/campaigns/scoape-ii )