Alpha Data Launches new Space Development Kit

New product version aimed at prototyping and developing novel applications with state-of-the-art Space-Grade FPGA

21 May 2021, Edinburgh, UK – Alpha Data, in collaboration with Xilinx and Texas Instruments, has launched a new Space Development Kit, the ADA-SDEV-KIT3, which will help users to rapidly test the hardware and software setups that look to incorporate the Xilinx™ Radiation Tolerant Kintex® UltraScale™ XQRKU060 Space-Grade FPGA.

Alpha Data’s new Space Development Kit, the ADA-SDEV-KIT3, is a development kit for the Xilinx™ Radiation Tolerant Kintex® UltraScale™ XQRKU060 FPGA, the world’s first 20nm
space-grade FPGA. The Xilinx XQRKU060 offers a 5x improvement over the previous generation of Space-Grade FPGAs, allowing the deployment of far more advanced communications, signal processing, image processing and machine learning applications.

The ADA-SDEV-KIT3 supersedes Alpha Data’s ADA-SDEV-KIT2 by adding Ethernet I/O and more flexible configuration options for SelectMAP Scrubbing. The improved version, which was developed following space industry feedback, makes the new Space Development Kit more powerful for customers interested in deploying FPGA hardware in harsh environments.

Alpha Data’s ADA-SDEV-KIT3 board powers the FPGA with a reference Texas Instruments power supply design. The power efficiency and the increased processing capacity of the new Space Development Kit will allow customers to design more computationally intensive solutions, with a focus on space deployable systems and payloads.

“We expect machine learning to become vital in dealing with the huge amount of data produced by satellite remote sensing,” commented Andrew McCormick, Technical Director at Alpha Data. “The ability to use machine learning to pre-process and filter data will provide a competitive edge, and this new Space Development Kit – the ADA-SDEV-KIT3 – helps our customers develop spacecraft payloads incorporating A.I. solutions.”