Study and implementation of a SpaceWire data-handling network for reconfigurable vision-based navigation systems

In the present thesis, I studied and prototyped a SpaceWire data-handling network for communication inside a vision-based navigation system designed by Thales Alenia Space for a space exploration mission on Mars and in particular during the final Entry, Descending and Landing (EDL) phase on the planet. The network is composed of several Codecs for interfacing with external world, one Router used to connect several sub-systems together and one RMAP block for performing read and write operations into a target RAM memory according to ECSS standards. All the three cores have been designed by a Japanese development team which made available open-source only their VHDL codes claiming compliance with ECSS standard. Therefore, during this thesis some missing parts have been recostructed and their working behaviour has been understood by means extensive simulations. In the end, the network has been implemented on hardware using a space qualified FPGA platform and functionally tested in a Hardware-in-the-loop system employing a Leon-3 processor. In the next future, this SpaceWire network can thus be used to exchange data and controls between feature extractor and matcher IP cores, camera and the on-board computer after additional testing on the implemented prototype.