SpaceWire-HS Host Adapter - An FPGA based PCI Express Device for Versatile High-Speed Channels

Robotic systems like the DLR Hand Arm System that feature control cycles beyond 1 kHz demand a deterministic and low latency communication. Therefore, DLR is working on high-speed SpaceWire. This paper presents the SpaceWire-HS host adapter, a FPGA driven PCI Express device for high-speed SpaceWire. The adapter provides a generic host interface for QNX real-time hosts, supported by a client C++ library. Two implementation variants of the adapter’s communication architecture and host interface are presented. The performance of both variants in terms of bandwidth and latency is discussed.