Towards Employing FPGA and ASIP Acceleration to Enable Onboard AI/ML in Space Applications
To address the limitations of conventional processors—insufficient computational capability, radiation susceptibility, and lack of dynamic adaptability—in spaceborne AI/ML applications, this paper proposes a heterogeneous on-board acceleration architecture integrating radiation-hardened (rad-hard) and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGAs with an AI-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP). The architecture innovatively combines rad-hard and COTS FPGA resources and incorporates custom compute units inspired by vision processing units (VPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), enabling deployment of high-order AI models and in-orbit dynamic reconfiguration. Through radiation-hardened design, a reconfigurable computing framework, and industrial-grade benchmarking, multi-platform prototype validation is achieved. Compared to representative spaceborne processors, the architecture delivers over 10× improvement in energy efficiency, enables real-time on-board image recognition and autonomous mission decision-making, and establishes a scalable architectural paradigm for high-reliability, high-performance spaceborne intelligent computing.