Multi-Gb/s Fiberoptic Physical Layer for Spacecraft Interconnects

We report on the development of a fiberoptic physical layer bus with RapidIO-protocol for spacecraft avionics interconnects. To emulate spacecraft instrument data transmission, dynamic routing of real-time live camera data packets is demonstrated through a switch-based network. For real-time instrument data input/output, an interface bridge between Ethernet protocol and RapidIO protocol is developed. RapidIO-based fiberoptic avionic system is compared with 1393 ring protocol based interconnect in terms of performance, flexibility, mass/power/size, and suitability for different mission applications. Fault tolerant architectures for RapidIO and 1393 ring-protocol-based spacecraft buses are also presented.