Leaving a late-May snow fall behind in Scotland STAR-Dundee headed to the sun of Long Beach, California, to exhibit and present at the 2^nd SpaceTech Expo.

Despite the depleted attendance due to the continuation of budget sequestration within the USA, the quality of visitors to the booth was still high.

The Open Forum gave us the opportunity to present “SpaceWire Technologies deliver multi-gigabit data rates for on-board Spacecraft” a brief introduction to SpaceFibre and a progress update on the developments and projects already adopting the gigabit network capability of SpaceFibre. This was particularly timely as, not only had the SpaceFibre IP core just been released to the fourth company to enter the SpaceFibre Beta program, but following on from the copper cable testing SpaceFibre had just been successfully tested running at 2.5Gbits over a 100m fibre optic connection.

Check our website for more details on SpaceFibre and the first available products: the SpaceFibre IP core and the diagnostic interface unit STAR Fire; the first product aimed at early SpaceFibre adoption.

Amid the backdrop of Port lodges and the historic buildings of Porto, the technologies presented at DASIA 2013 provided a lot of interest for STAR-Dundee attendees.

From the SpaceWire portfolio the most recent additions were presented: the SpaceWire EGSE and the AT7913E based SpaceWire RTC Development Kit. The SpaceWire EGSE, a programmable device simulator, is already proving popular due to it’s intuitive script language allowing complex instrument simulation to be achieved in a day, combined with it’s hardware based functionality giving it true real-time behaviour. Similarly the SpaceWire RTC Development Kit, that includes a fully integrated software development environment, is gaining a foothold as the one-stop-shop hardware and software development platform for the radiation tolerant Atmel AT7913E. The AT7913E RTC is a single-chip embedded system containing a radiation tolerant SPARC V8 core with FPU and embedded interfaces that acts as the bridge from sensor networks to SpaceWire networks, with the capability to effectively perform data handling at platform level and powerful data processing at payload level.

Under the University of Dundee banner, Managing Director Steve Parkes gave the first technical presentation outside the SpaceWire User Group forum about SpaceFibre. SpaceFibre is a multi-gigabit network protocol that builds on the SpaceWire protocol taking data rates to 2.5Gbits, and by greatly enhancing the fault tolerance and adding quality of service mechanisms allowing SpaceWire technologies to be a serious proposition for mission critical applications and an excellent option for other sectors such as Aerospace industry.

Check our website for more details on all the devices mentioned: SpaceWire EGSE,  SpaceWire RTC Development Kit and SpaceFibre.

Technical details and availability of the radiation tolerant AT7913E and other radiation tolerant devices can be obtained from Atmel.