Multi-link SpaceWire Recorder (MSR)

The Multi-link SpaceWire Recorder (MSR) enables passive recording of SpaceWire transfers between devices and subsystems, on up to four links per MSR unit. It monitors packets in both directions on each SpaceWire link, adding time tags on the start and end of each packet, and sending data to a computer for recording and analysis.

Software is provided to help manage and search the recordings. Multiple MSRs can be synchronized to within 10ns to give uniform time-tags across a system, even if the system has many SpaceWire links and the recordings are being made onto different computers. Low-level SpaceWire errors can be also be recorded and displayed as a waveform trace complete with protocol decode.

For one customer, we have recently used three Multi-link SpaceWire Recorders to monitor a SpaceWire network that contained six processing nodes and two routers. All of the traffic on ten bidirectional SpaceWire links was captured. The results were analysed to show the complete traffic against time, as well as the distribution of latencies for individual links and the effect of blocking in the routers. We could then drill down to inspect particular RMAP protocol interactions and the contents of specific SpaceWire packets.

The MSR brings to SpaceWire the comprehensive records that are available from earlier and much slower on-board technologies such as MIL 1553.

Download the MSR Product Brief (PDF)