A SpaceFibre router has been designed and implemented by STAR-Dundee. The architecture of this router, SUNRISE SpaceFibre Routing Switch, is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 SUNRISE SpaceFibre Router Architecture

The SUNRISE router has eight SpaceFibre ports, numbered 1 to 8, each with four virtual channels. There is a configuration port (port 0) which is used for device configuration and which can be accessed using virtual channel 0 of any of the other ports. Another port (port 9) provides an interface to four SpaceWire ports using four virtual channels, one for each SpaceWire port. SpaceWire and SpaceFibre packets are switched by the routing switch in the same way, using the leading data character of a packet to determine the output port that the packet is to be switched to. Both path and logical addressing can be used.

Figure 2 SUNRISE SpaceFibre Routers Under Test

The SUNRISE router has been implemented initially in a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA. Two of the SUNRISE routers are shown under test in Figure 3 2. The SUNRISE prototype are implemented on 3U cPCI/PXI boards. Power is taken from the backplane and the eight SpaceFibre and four SpaceWire ports are available on the 40mm wide front panel.

A complete SpaceFibre demonstration system has been developed to verify and validate the operation of the SUNRISE router.

SUNRISE Project

The SUNRISE project is a UK Space Agency, Centre for Earth Observation and Space Technology (CEOI-ST) project in which STAR-Dundee and University of Dundee is designing and validating critical SpaceFibre router technology necessary for future on-board data-handling systems.