SpaceFibre IP Cores for the Next Generation of Radiation-Tolerant FPGAs

SpaceFibre (ECSS-E-ST-50-11C) is a very high-performance, high-reliability and high-availability network technology specifically designed to meet the needs of space applications. It provides point-to-point and networked interconnections at Gigabit rates with Quality of Service (QoS) and Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR). SpaceFibre has been designed as a replacement of SpaceWire (ECSS-E-ST-50-12C)-it is backwards compatible with SpaceWire at the packet level-for next-generation space missions where very high throughput is required, providing up to 6.25 Gbit/s per lane, with multi-lane allowing to reach up to 16 times the speed of a single lane. NORBY and OPS-SAT technology demonstrators have already flown SpaceFibre, with more missions in both Europe and the USA currently designing or planning to use SpaceFibre. STAR-Dundee has developed a complete family of SpaceFibre IP cores fully compliant with the SpaceFibre standard. This family is composed of four different IPs: Single-Lane Interface, Multi-Lane Interface, Single-Lane Routing Switch and Multi-Lane Routing Switch. A new generation of radiation-tolerant FPGAs is emerging to cope with the ever-growing processing power required by newer missions. Microchip has released the PolarFire RTPF500, Xilinx the Versal XQRVC1902, and NanoXplore the BRAVE NG-Ultra. SpaceFibre operation requires serial transceivers, which are already inbuilt in modern FPGAs. The IPs have been adapted to take advantage of the specific transceivers and memory blocks offered by these new FPGAs. In this work we analyse in detail the performance of STAR-Dundee SpaceFibre IP cores on this new generation of FPGAs considering several performance metrics, e.g. maximum lane speed, resource usage, etc. We also compare the performance of the IPs with current state-of-the-art space-grade FPGAs, i.e. Microchip RTG4 and Xilinx Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060. This analysis can also be used as a representative benchmark to compare the performances of the different FPGAs available for space.