Abstract: Small Satellites aim to achieve low-cost, lightweight and fast access to space and this is normally supported by the use of commercial-off-the-shelf components and development tools. System-on-a-programmable-chip is a major enabling technology. Such a single-chip solution to the core data handling, communications and control systems will dramatically reduce size, complexity and cost of small satellites electronics. This paper is concerned with the implementation of a small satellite on-board computer (OBC) on a single programmable logic chip. Integration of soft intellectual property cores forming a main subsystem of the system-on-a-chip OBC (SoC-OBC) is detailed. A XILINX Virtex Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used for prototyping of the SoC. This single-chip OBC is composed of Microprocessor IP Core and other soft peripheral IP core. Implementation methods and results would be described and demonstrated in this paper.