Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Reconfigurable hardware accelerators for high performance radiation tolerant computers(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2014) Weber, Raymond Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brock LaMeresComputers play an important role in spaceflight and with ever more complex mission goals and sensors, current devices are not sufficient to meet the requirements of planned missions. These challenges are complicated by memory corruption caused by high energy radiation inherent in the space environment. We propose the use of commercial field programmable gate arrays using partial reconfiguration, triple modular redundancy with spares and memory scrubbing to achieve a radiation hard, high performance system. This strategy is leveraged on modern fabrication process nodes largely eliminating long term effects of radiation on silicon devices and shifting the focus strictly on memory corruption errors. This dissertation improves the performance of Montana State University's (MSU) existing CubeSat computing research platform through the addition of hardware accelerator tiles, a reliability analysis and analysis of the power consumption vs performance tradeoffs allowing for the development of a metric for the use of accelerator functions.Item Development of a cognitive array system(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2010) Weber, Raymond Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Richard Wolff; Yikun Huang (co-chair)This thesis proposes a design for a cognitive array system for next generation wireless communication systems, combining the techniques of cognitive radios and adaptive array systems. This novel array system allows for the possibility of greater spectral usage and reuse, and improved communication ranges. In this thesis, numerous algorithms were studied to map an RF environment in both spatial and spectral domains that would be useful in this system. Towards this goal, direction of arrival estimation, frequency sensing and spectral hole finding algorithms were studied, in addition to a joint frequency and direction of arrival estimation algorithm. Beamforming was also studied as a means of improving signal quality and increasing range. Once the direction to a target was found, localization and tracking were studied to further refine the target's position and change in position over time. After the algorithms were studied in simulation to determine their properties, hardware calibration was performed followed by laboratory tests of the methods with a uniform circular array testbed at Montana State University to verify the expected performances.