On-board networks with radiation-hardened 45nm SOI standard components

This paper describes the key components for implementing a modern network for intra-satellite communications at the backplane and spacecraft local area network (LAN) levels. The objective network is capable of supporting orders of magnitude more on-board processing than current architectures based on parallel PCI-bus, MIL-STD-1553B and SpaceWire alone. The RADNET^™ family supports the emerging SpaceVPX standard at the backplane level including RapidIO data plane, SpaceWire control plane, and I²C utility plane. RapidIO, SpaceWire and MIL-STD- 1553B are the primary interfaces supported at the spacecraft local area network (LAN) level. Heritage network components are available to support parallel PCI-bus, SpaceWire and MIL-STD-1553B. The latest RADNET components use BAE System´s RH45^™ radiation-hardened by design (RHBD) 45nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) ASIC library and are manufactured at the IBM Trusted foundry. These include a RapidIO network endpoint, an 18-port, 192-Gb/s RapidIO packet switch, and a 16-by-16-lane, 5-Gbaud per lane physical layer serializer-deserializer (SerDes) crosspoint switch. Network architecture, technical challenges, component architectures, development methodology, implementation, programming and path to flight are discussed.