• satellite
• spacefibre
• systemverilog
• uvm
• vhdl

The innovation in the space missions field is quickly increasing the necessity of high transmission rates. Nowadays the most used transmission standard for space missions is the SpaceWire, that is able to reach speeds in the order of 200Mbps. While SpaceWire is a widely diffused protocol and a robust choice, modern missions requires higher data rates, in the order of Gbps, and so the necessity to develop its successor is really strong.
A typical example is a spacecraft collecting high definition images that must be transferred from the camera to the payload data processing entities at a very high speed, in order to not stall the data acquisition.
Moreover, spacecrafts are exposed to an high radiation intensity and have special requirements in terms of reliability and efficiency, so common commercial solutions generally cannot be adopted.
SpaceFibre provides a very high speed serial data link for the high-rate payloads typical of scientific missions. It offers an increasing of performance with respect to the SpaceWire by a factor of 10, reaching an effective data rate of 2Gbit/s by now and of 20Gbit/s using the Multilanes technology.
SpaceFibre also introduces the concept of Quality of Service and it is able to support best effort, bandwidth reservation, scheduling and priority policies. Through this mechanism it is possible to transfer high amount of data ensuring at the same time a bounded delay for critical packets by using different virtual channels.
Typical application scenarios where SpaceFibre can be used as link are synthetic aperture radar and hyper-spectral optical instruments.
This thesis deals with the development of a SpaceFibre CODEC IP. In the first part the standard is introduced to briefly summarize its main aspects and to better understand technical chapters. Next, the SpaceFibre CODEC IP is analyzed, with a detailed description of the main implementation choices. The main effort was spent in the development of the testbench. It is realized in SystemVerilog using the UVM framework, that is the state of the art in this field. Finally, there are some simulation results, with a deep view into SpaceFibre mechanisms.
This work was elaborated in cooperation with the PhD. Daniele Davalle. In general, he focused on the design part, while this thesis is mainly about the testing part.