SpaceWire Rad Hard ASIC and Evaluation Board

SpaceWire is a spacecraft communication network coordinated by the European Space Agency, and used in some NASA spacecraft. BAE Systems is the first company to produce a chip that is fully compliant to SpaceWire standards.

SpaceWire radiation-hardened single-chip interface performs the functions of multiple chips at a fraction of the size while saving cost, space, weight, and power. Developed through a partnership with NASA, SpaceWire interface chips will be used on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions.

By integrating multiple functions, this single-chip solution eliminates the need for an additional bus for command and control by enabling the reliable transport of SpaceWire high-speed serial links. The chip is radiation-hardened to 200 krad(Si) total dose, measures less than 1E-9 upsets/bit-day SEU, and is latchup-immune.

FEATURES

Four SpaceWire ports and two peripheral component interconnect busses, connected by a six-port router.
A multi-gigabyte memory interface supported by a direct-memory access controller.
An embedded microcontroller usable for packet-processing or standalone operation.

Additionally, BAE Systems has created a SpaceWire evaluation board. The 6U 160 CompactPCI evaluation board represents a first generation SpaceWire solution. This cost-effective prototyping board uses the custom SpaceWire application-specific integrated circuit to implement a four-port SpaceWire card with onboard memory. It provides complete router capability among the four ports, along with two user-end-point ports.