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 in use in at least two operational missions since 2021, 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 such as maximum lane speed, resource usage, etc. We also compare the performance of the IPs with current state-of-the-art space-grade FPGAs, Microchip’s RTG4 and Xilinx’s Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060. This analysis can also be used as a representative benchmark to compare the performances of the different FPGAs available for space applications.

SpaceFibre is a high-performance, high-reliability and high-availability network technology designed for spaceflight and other demanding applications. A SpaceFibre routing switch forms the heart of a SpaceFibre network, interconnecting instruments and payload data-handling equipment. This paper introduces SpaceFibre and then describes the STAR-Tiger SpaceFibre routing switch.

SpaceFibre is an on-board network technology for spaceflight applications capable of running at multi Gbit/s and which runs over electrical or fibre-optic cables.
Using multiple lanes, SpaceFibre can scale up the link signalling rate and corresponding data rate. For example, a quad-lane SpaceFibre link running at a lane signalling rate of 6.25 Gbit/s has a link signalling rate of 25 Gbit/s. SpaceFibre currently uses 8b/10b encoding and there is additionally an approximate 4% protocol overhead for unidirectional traffic and 7% protocol overhead for bidirectional traffic. For a 25 Gbit/s link signalling rate, this results in approximately 19.2 Gbit/s unidirectional data rate or 18.6 Gbit/s bidirectional data rate.
The objective of the system described in this paper is to utilise the high data rates provided by SpaceFibre as much as possible in embedded systems with minimal Central Processing Unit (CPU) utilisation. This objective is achieved using a Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) based SpaceFibre Endpoint to minimise the amount of work performed by the CPU and provide a low-cost path between user-space software applications and the physical SpaceFibre network.
This paper provides background on the SpaceFibre Endpoint research and development, describes how RDMA is used over SpaceFibre, presents the SpaceFibre Endpoint test system, then provides performance results for the SpaceFibre Endpoint test system.