Designing and testing Avionics Digital Video Bus (ARINC 818) interfaces

ARINC 818 (Avionics Digital Video Bus) has gained wide adoption on new, large aircraft such as the Boeing 787, KC-46A and the Airbus A350XWB and many others. ARINC 818 is used in high-speed, low-latency, mission-critical systems such as cockpit displays, mission processors, video concentrators, radar, moving maps, cameras and infrared sensors. Design and validation of high-speed ARINC 818 interfaces in FPGAs presents many challenges due to the low latency and line synchronous timing requirements of most displays. This paper is based on years of practical design experience and covers: Understanding and completing an ICD, building ARINC frames, IP core use, FPGA implementation issues, signal switching considerations, time interleaving for multiple video streams on a signal link, multi-channel implementation issues, physical layer considerations, protocol validation, and timing validation.