Improvements in space radiation-tolerant FPGA implementation of land surface temperature-split window algorithm

Abstract

The trend in satellite remote sensing assignments has continuously been concerning using hardware devices with more flexibility, smaller size, and higher computational power. Therefore, field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) technology is often used by the developers of the scientific community and equipment for carrying out different satellite remote sensing algorithms. This article explains hardware implementation of land surface temperature split window (LST-SW) algorithm based on the FPGA. To get a high-speed process and real-time application, VHSIC hardware description language (VHDL) was employed to design the LST-SW algorithm. The paper presents the benefits of the used Virtex-4QV of radiation tolerant series FPGA. The experimental results revealed that the suggested implementation of the algorithm using Virtex4QV achieved higher throughput of 435.392 Mbps, and faster processing time with value of 2.95 ms. Furthermore, a comparison between the proposed implementation and existing work demonstrated that the proposed implementation has better performance in terms of area utilization; 1.17% reduction in number of Slice used and 1.06% reduction in of LUTs. Moreover, the significant advantage of area utilization would be the none use of block RAMs comparing to existing work using three blocks RAMs. Finally, comparison results show improvements using the proposed implementation with rates of 2.28% higher frequency, 3.66 x higher throughput, and 1.19% faster processing time.