Design and implementation of a complete test equipment solution for SpaceWire links

Spacecraft used in space mission have on-board a large number of peripherals such as instruments, mass-memory, downlink telemetry, sensors, actuators and processors. The State-Of-The-Art for the on-board spacecraft communication is the SpaceWire standard, which connects on-board devices directly, via point-to-point communication, or indirectly via router or switch. This paper presents the architectural design and the implementation of a complete test equipment solution for SpaceWire link. This is designed in order to have in a single device the possibility to emulate both a single SpaceWire device and a portion of a SpaceWire network. In order to validate the proposed architecture, a demonstration prototype has been implemented.