Design and implementation of test equipment for SpaceFibre links: SpaceFibre, short paper

SpaceFibre is the upcoming European standard for on-board high-speed communications. The need for data-rate beyond 1 Gb/s is already present in space missions, and it is currently fulfilled by non-standard approaches based on Serialiser/Deserialiser components such as Texas Instruments TLK2711. The SpaceFibre standard also integrates Quality of Service and Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery mechanisms, which allow a highly reliable communication, suitable for space systems. The abovementioned features make the SpaceFibre standard undoubtedly complex; therefore an adequate test equipment is necessary for the validation of systems based on this standard. In this paper, a test equipment for SpaceFibre links is presented. This is designed to support the development of new SpaceFibre devices, as well as complex systems based on SpaceFibre. A system demonstrator was implemented to validate the equipment features.