An Optical SpaceFibre Testbed for Transceiver Evaluation and Validation of a Design-Time Configurable Router

State-of-the-art on-board data handling systems demand very high-speed serial communication links to avoid bottlenecks in data processing. These links can be implemented using optical transceivers in conjunction with high-speed Serializer/Deserializers (SERDES). On top of that, a high-speed protocol such as SpaceFibre provides the required system-level Fault-Detection, Fault-Isolation and Recovery Techniques (FDIR) and Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Optical transceivers provide several key advantages in comparison to classical electrical coupling. They allow for significant harness reduction while also providing data rates beyond 10 Gbit/s and superior characteristics such as galvanic isolation and high signal quality over long distances. Recently, companies such as Smith Interconnect or Glenair have successfully qualified optical transceivers for space applications, paving the way for usage in next-generation spacecraft. Current missions have also adopted multi-port and multi-lane link implementations, which utilize multiple such links in parallel to deal with increasing data throughput. This allows system designers to scale the available bandwidth to fulfil mission requirements. In this paper, we propose an FPGA-based optical transceiver testbed for SpaceFibre that comprises eight physical links at very high data rates of 10 Gbit/s to develop and validate both multi-port/multi-lane implementations and optical transceivers. We use this testbed to validate a SpaceFibre router. The router IP is generated by a customizable code generator, which derives the switch matrix from a system-level network topology description at design time. We show that this allows for a highly optimized implementation for modern space FPGAs and provides static fault isolation and security guarantees for the end-user.