Image Processing

[Altera_Forum]

What Applications do FPGAs find in satellite image processing an compression.

[Altera_Forum]

Many. 

 Why are you asking?  Are you asking about the parts that can be at the head end up in the sat, or down on the ground after the signals are transmitted to earth?  Help us help you.

[Altera_Forum]

I meant on board the satellite as images are compressed and transmitted from there.

[Altera_Forum]

In general, various compression algorithms are implemented quite easily in FPGA's. Reed Solomon and other coding schemes are also used for transmission. 

 Currently I do not believe Altera offers Space Hardened FPGA's. I think Xilinx offers a few families which are being field tested in space right now. I think they were involved with the Mars Rover wheel drive sections and a test in an Austrailian sat. Google may help there.  Why do you ask?

[Altera_Forum]

i think xilinx offers a few families which are being field tested in space right now. 

 That's possible. I also know of at least one project that's evaluating un-hardened Xilinx chips for space. "Hardening" consists of triple-redundancy of the design, obeying some design restrictions within each replicated module, and using partial reconfiguration to scrub the chip more or less continuously.   Scrubbing means disabling one of the three replicas while the other two keep on working, and rewriting it with the same configuration bits so any bit-flips get cleaned out. They don't even look to see whether bits have flipped - they just assume it happens.   Actel's antifuse arrays have been in space a lot, but don't have the arithmetic capability of doing much compression.