Hardware/Software FPGA-based Network Emulator for High-speed On-board Communications

This paper presents a network emulator for rapid prototyping of SpaceWire Intellectual Property cores. SpaceWire is a fault-tolerant high-throughput standard widely used in space and avionic applications. Thanks to its inherent properties, SpaceWire can be effectively adopted for addressing dependability and bandwidth requirements of forthcoming active safety automotive applications. The proposed platform considers both anti-fuse and SRAM FPGA devices. A four-layer software stack ensures full control of prototype features, batch testing and ease of use.