A PXI based implementation of a TLK2711 equivalent interface

In the last few years, satellite on board data handling data rate requirements increased dramatically, from hundreds of megabits per second to several gigabits per second. SpaceWire, the current generation European standard communication protocol, is no more able to satisfy the demanding requirements, while the upcoming protocol, SpaceFibre, has not been adopted yet in any current space missions. This resulted in the adoption by the industry and by space agencies of a non-standardized solution, the TLK2711 ASIC chip, which implements lower communication protocol levels of the Open System Interconnection stack (Wizard Link), leaving to the user the implementation of higher-level stack layers. Consequently in the space community the need for hardware to test these systems grown. In this paper, an implementation of a Wizard Link TLK2711 equivalent circuit on a National Instruments PXI platform is presented, in order to boost the development of TLK2711 compatible ground test equipment.