A single board computer design for flight control systems

Single board computers are compact and widespread solutions for commercial, industrial and military projects. Although the technical specs, capabilities, peripherals and interfaces differ, a standalone hardware including at least a processor which an operating system run on it with desired peripherals and interfaces such as RAM's, memories and various ports can be called as a single board computer. In this thesis, a single board computer hardware developed in TUBITAK-BILGEM-ILTAREN (The Scientific and Research Council of Turkey - Informatics and Information Security Research Center - Advanced Technologies Research Institute) as a part of a project of the Digital Hardware Design Group and which can be used in flight control systems is presented. Beginning from the literature survey and market research for component selection; architectural design and detailed schematic designs are carried out as well as PCB design and implementation. This thesis includes critical design decisions, comparison of alternative designs, methods and topologies for architectural, schematic and PCB design phases along with the signal integrity considerations and necessary calculations and simulations in order to accomplish the design. Though the designed hardware is manufactured, assembled and the board bring-up process is completed successfully, all these stages are excluded from the scope as the thesis focuses on the design. This design is based on Xilinx Zynq-7000 XC7Z045, an all programmable SoC with on-chip dual-core ARM® Cortex-A9 processor and 350K programmable logic cells. Therefore the ultimate design actually includes intellectual property implementations for the FPGA side of the SoC and firmware/software development including the algorithm implementations as well. These are also out of the scope of the thesis and only the board design stages of the computer are demonstrated. Furthermore, while the hardware design including architectural, schematics and PCB design stages is completely accomplished by the author of the thesis, digital designs for the FPGA and firmware/software development processes are carried out by other team members. This is another reason why they are excluded in addition to the fact that the thesis focuses only on the hardware development. Zynq-7000 SoC, DDR-3 RAM's, NAND flash memory, external SD memories and VGA, RS-232, RS-422 and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces as well as the power distribution network are the main blocks of the computer. Hardware design details about each block beside deep background information are given in the thesis.