Performance and Utilization Results for Time-Triggered Data Transfers over SpaceWire

Abstract

SpaceWire as a serial communication technology is widely used throughout the space domain but is still insufficient in providing real-time data transfers, especially if network structures contain cascaded routers. This paper presents a system capable to overcome this limitation by use of a timetriggered data transfer with focus on a decentralized time distribution. Besides the introduction of technical concepts, startup behavior and clock synchronization is evaluated for a whole network. This evaluation is done with respect to different network configurations and injection of oscillator uncertainties. The system is implemented by a hardware description language to be used on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Therefore the FPGA resource utilization and the maximum operation frequency are investigated for different target devices.