Eye Diagram Analyser for Space High-Speed Serial Links: a Tool for Evaluating Signal Integrity in SpaceFibre Links

An eye diagram, or eye pattern, is a valuable metric to assess the quality of a digital signal in telecommunications. It represents a remarkable solution in those cases where it is not possible to analyze the quality of the end-to-end communication by directly measuring electric signals. Nevertheless, this kind of analysis is nowadays required also in the space domain since modern on-board data-handling systems can feature multi-gigabit communication links. For example, the European Space Agency (ESA) supports the adoption of the SpaceFibre protocol, which provides a maximum data rate of 6.25 Gbps. In this paper, we present the integration of the eye margin analysis in a commercial test equipment for high-speed protocols: the SpaceWire/SpaceFibre Analyser Real-Time (SpaceART). The SpaceART instrument features Multi-Gigabit serial Transceivers (MGT), and it is compatible with the data rate of current and next generation space high-speed communication protocols. The proposed system for Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) allows users to automatically capture and visualize on a dedicated Graphical User Interface (GUI) the resulting output of the eye scan system within the seamless testing environment. Statistical Eye diagrams acquisition results are presented for several SpaceFibre data-rate of reference, highlighting the effects of different communication speeds on the SpaceFibre link signal integrity.