New Approaches for DC Balanced SpaceWire

Direct Current (DC) line balanced SpaceWire is attractive for a number of reasons. Firstly, a DC line balanced interface provides the ability to isolate the physical layer with either a transformer or capacitor to achieve higher common mode voltage rejection and/or the complete galvanic isolation in the case of a transformer. Secondly, it provides the possibility to reduce the number of conductors and transceivers in the classical SpaceWire interface by half by eliminating the Strobe line. Depending on the modulator scheme - the clock data recovery frequency requirements may be only twice that of the transmit clock, or even match the transmit clock: depending on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) decoder design. In this paper, several different implementation scenarios will be discussed. Two of these scenarios are backward compatible with the existing SpaceWire hardware standards except for changes at the character level. Three other scenarios, while decreasing by half the standard SpaceWire hardware components, will require changes at both the character and signal levels and work with fixed rates. Other scenarios with variable data rates will require an additional SpaceWire interface handshake initialization sequence.