The Winter Satellite Workshop running this week near Helsinki, Finland is definitely the place to be for a space professional or an enthusiast - reports Artur Jutman, CEO of Testonica. With over 1000 attendees registered for this hybrid (online and on-site) event, it is an important networking platform for the vibrant space community of the Nordic and Baltic region.

 

Artur adds that "besides the impressive 256 oral and poster presentations and considerable expo area, the culmination hot-spot of the program was the evening sauna session arranged by Kuva Space! Together with chilling "snow-bathing" this gave the whole event a true winter feeling!"

 

Relying on our decade-long experience in serving "terrestrial" companies, we are fully convinced that the satellite hardware developers can significantly benefit from employing our Test & Measurement framework, which has found a wide-spread use pushing testing and troubleshooting costs down for high-performance product owners and manufacturers.

 

The Quick Instruments framework is deployed into an on-board FPGA device populating it with T&M instrumentation targeting all on-board buses and peripherals as well as external communication interfaces, thus converting that FPGA into a fully-featured embedded tester. Controlled by a simple script the test execution would first start the on-board clock frequency check followed by memory testing and measuring signal integrity on buses and links. Combined with external ATE / EGSE equipment, the embedded T&M framework would close the loop offering full transparency in diagnostic access both from external interfaces as well as right from the inside allowing to catch defects very early in product development and production cycle.

 

"We have recently completed a couple of projects for the New Space segment and expect a growing demand, as the space industry adopts high-performance FPGAs with increasing pace. So, the test technology has to also evolve accordingly" says Dr. Artur Jutman.