Spacefibre: Advanced network technology for spacecraft on-board applications

SpaceFibre is a multi-gigabit/s serial network technology which operates over fibre optic or electrical media and which is designed specifically for spaceflight applications. SpaceFibre aims to support high data-rate payloads, for example synthetic aperture radar and hyper-spectral optical instruments, operating at 2.5 Gbits/s with current flight proven technology, at over 4 Gbits/s with radiation tolerant chip technology currently being developed, and at over 20 Gbits/s using multiple lanes. It provides robust, long distance communications for launcher applications and supports avionics applications with deterministic delivery capability. SpaceFibre provides a quality of service mechanism able to support priority, bandwidth reservation and scheduling. It incorporates fault detection, isolation and recovery (FDIR) capability in the interface hardware. It is designed to be implemented efficiently, requiring only three times the number of logic gates of a SpaceWire interface while providing many capabilities missing from SpaceWire. Furthermore SpaceFibre is backwards compatible with SpaceWire at the network level allowing existing SpaceWire devices to be readily integrated into a SpaceFibre network and to take advantage of its QoS and FDIR capabilities. This paper provides an introduction to SpaceFibre, provides an update on the status of the formal SpaceFibre standard, describes radiation tolerant chips using SpaceFibre and introduces test equipment developed to support SpaceFibre applications.