The Q8 is the highest performance member of the Xiphos Q‐Card family of low-cost, embedded nodes for control, processing and interface applications, primarily for aerospace markets. Q-Cards combine a small form factor with broad networking, processing and I/O capabilities.

At the core of the Q8 is the Zynq UltraScale+, providing a hybrid environment of powerful multi-core CPUs and reprogrammable logic, providing extremely high performance and flexibility. The library of logic and software functions is augmented by a large array of onboard digital I/O.

The high performance and extensive FPGA fabric make the Q8 ideally suited for onboard Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing, hyper/multispectral compression, stereo and monocular visual odometry, image registration and alignment, advanced Software Defined Radios (SDR), and convolutional neural networks.

The Q8 is typically used with an application-specific daughtercard designed to mission form-factor and with appropriate connectors. The broad set of interfaces available from the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC provides extensive flexibility for virtually any mission.

Each Q8 is delivered with a Product Integration Module (PIM) which provides additional interfaces and features for ease of development.

Further information on standard daughtercards and enclosures is available on request from Xiphos.

The Q8 processor card offers the following key features:

• Builds on extensive heritage from flight-proven Q-card family
• Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) Processing FPGA, including quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 Application Processing Unit, dual-core ARM Cortex-R5 Real-Time Processing Unit, and an ARM Mali-400 GPU supported by massive programmable logic resources
• Memory: LPDDR4 RAM (with EDAC), 2x QSPI Flash (NOR), 2x eMMC
• Power: typ. 3.5W @ 6V to 16V
• Interfaces included: Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 & 3.1, serial, wide array of I/Os (including Gigabit transceivers for SATA or PCI express) accessible through mezzanine connectors

Xiphos also offers a range of ancillary services for Q-card customers including additional hardware and firmware development, software hybridization and Linux driver/API & application software development.

The video below is a presentation by Xiphos from the 2021 satsearch webinar: "a guide to advanced data processing and AI for satellite missions". For more information about the webinar, and to see footage of the entire event, please click here here