SpaceFibre is a multi-Gbits/s, on-board network technology for spaceflight applications, which runs over electrical or fiber-optic cables. SpaceFibre supports multi-lane, thus allowing data to be sent over several individual physical lanes to enhance throughput and robustness. This is required by new generation payloads, such as SAR and multi-spectral imaging instruments. This paper describes the development of the multi-lane capabilities of SpaceFibre and its successful hardware implementation on space-qualified devices. The protocol has been designed to work with an arbitrary number of bidirectional or unidirectional lanes. In the event of a lane failing, SpaceFibre multi-lane mechanism supports hot redundancy and graceful degradation by automatically spreading traffic over the remaining working lanes. User data transfer is resumed in just a few microseconds without any data loss. These advanced capabilities are not provided in other high-speed link protocols available for space applications.

SpaceFibre is a new technology for use onboard spacecraft that provides point-to-point and networked interconnections at Gigabit rates with in-built Quality of Service and Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery. The SpaceFibre standard is virtually finished, with the ECSS standardisation activity to be ended this year. There is a need for equipment to support the development and testing of applications of the entire protocol stack. This paper describes the new generation of SpaceFibre equipment designed for this purpose. They provide users with several options for platforms and connectors, such as FMC, USB 3.0, cPCI, PXI, PXIe and SpaceVPX. The number of platforms supported and the flexibility of the equipment provides the end user with a broad range of options to include SpaceFibre in their current system design. This helps to promote the adoption of SpaceFibre technology. A number of designs using the equipment here described is currently available or under development. They include the SUNRISE SpaceFibre Router and the Multilane SpaceFibre interface, among others. When combined, these new boards and designs offer a powerful and rich set of tools to help with SpaceFibre designs.

SpaceFibre [1][2][3] is the next generation of SpaceWire [4] on-board data-handling network technology for spaceflight operations, which runs over both electrical and fibre optic media. SpaceFibre has many benefits compared to SpaceWire, including much higher data-rates, integrated quality of service, fault recovery capabilities, multi-laning with graceful degradation and hot and cold redundancy, and low-latency broadcast messages that can carry 8-bytes of user information. Importantly SpaceFibre is backwards compatible with SpaceWire at the network level, allowing existing SpaceWire equipment to be incorporated into a SpaceFibre network without modification. SpaceFibre networks have been defined by the University of Dundee and STAR-Dundee, and incorporated in the network layer definition of the current draft SpaceFibre standard. STAR-Dundee has designed a SpaceFibre routing switch to evaluate various routing concepts, validate the standard specification and demonstrate a complete SpaceFibre network. A demonstration system has been built and key parts of the SpaceFibre network technology have been demonstrated.

SpaceFibre is a new standard for spacecraft on-board data-handling networks, which runs over both electrical and fibre optic media. It provides high bandwidth, low latency, fault recovery and novel QoS that combines priority, bandwidth reservation and scheduling. SpaceFibre is backwards compatible with SpaceWire at the network level, allowing existing SpaceWire equipment to be incorporated into a SpaceFibre network without modification. SpaceFibre is now being designed into its first spaceflight missions. This paper describes SpaceFibre flight equipment being designed by STAR-Dundee for space flight applications. This includes a range of SpaceFibre IP cores targeted at radiation tolerant FPGAs and the SpaceFibre interfaces in a radiation tolerant many core DSP processor.

For those responsible for the design and implementation of a SpaceFibre network it is essential to be able to capture and view the traffic on a SpaceFibre link in order to help validate the link is operating as expected and debug the link should any unexpected behaviour be observed. STAR-Dundee Ltd have developed hardware independent SpaceFibre Link Analyser software for this purpose. This paper describes how the software views, combined with the traffic capture capabilities of the STAR Fire unit, can be used to perform SpaceFibre link analysis.