2010-10-08 SpaceWire at SRON

The purpose of SpaceWire (short: SpWi), is a standard to connect pieces of a satellite for data retrieval and control. The speed is 2 to max. 400 MBit/s. The missions SWIFT and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter use SpaceWire.

SpaceWire Lab Cables.jpg (Image courtesy of STAR-Dundee)

The signal is sent using LVDS, low voltage differential signalling. It's a full duplex line, with two pairs each way. The standard defines the cabling in about eight pages.

The encoding is done using Data Strobe Encoding. Tx and Rx do not share a common clock. The advantage is that you're resistant against clock skew. The disadvantage is that you now have two frequency domains in your FPGA.

There are four- and ten-bit tokens where the first bit is a parity bit and the second is the indicator for the token length. The four bit tokens are for control purposes, and there are four possible tokens. Notice there is no defined packet content; nor is there a defined length. In OSI terms, SpaceWire describes the physical and datalink layer.

An active SpaceWire link is never silent, between data the transmitter sends NULL codes. These can also be sent between the bytes of a packet. The standard also defines a time code, a special data packet for time sync purposes. The contents are not defined in the standard. This packet gets priority above data so you can send it anytime (yes, even right in a packet). For flow control, the receiver sends flow control tokens (FCT) to the data sender. For each token you can send eight characters. These can be send ahead. The FCT is one of the four control tokens. For link management, a handshake is defined. For parity errors there is no retry mechanism.

Although SpaceWire is point to point, it's possible to create networks; you then stick the packet route (the path) in address bytes in front of packets, and like the old Internet bang addresses, these are removed by each router at each step. Thus routing is simple and defined on a relatively low level.

Since there are basically two types of data you'd want to send (sensor and housekeeping data), there are two protocols. RMAP, remote memory access protocol, is most useful for housekeeping purposes. STP (Streaming Transport Protocol) is better for sensor data. In the past, SRON used CCSDS where now RMAP is used in SpWi. STP is meant for bulk transfers. The packet overhead is lower than with RMAP because the stream is first set up, then explicitly closed when necessary.

SRON has set up a test project for which the purpose was: Two SpWi ports, proper Linux driver and 8 MByte/s sustained data throughput via a PCI card. We've tried boards from Aurelia and STAR-Dundee. There are also boards from 4Links and Dynamic Engineering. The Linux as well as the Windows drivers were unable to get the required speed.

SRON has also looked into a SpaceWire IP core which had to be vendor independent (Actel and Xilinx), implemented as an AMBA interface (for inclusion in a LEON core) and available in VHDL (not just a netlist). And reasonably priced. ESA has this available.

In a test setup with a PCI card and an Actel board, we could get up to 6 MByte/s due to a slow Linux driver. Yes, that's 6 megabyte of data per second. A better solution was to put in an intermediary board with a LEON core that translated to Gigabit Ethernet.

There is also a SpaceWire Light IP core via the OpenCores project.