SpaceWire Monitor

Need to qualify your system - capture the control and response to memory for analysis? Perhaps your system is getting out of sync or seemingly providing the wrong data at the wrong time, or a myriad of other T&I issues that can crop up. Capture data to support system qualification. The purpose is sometimes called Snoop, Snooper, Snooping, Sniff, Sniffer, Sniffing, Bus Monitor, Monitoring etc. Whatever you call the function, the idea is to capture data in real-time to support system level and card level diagnosis or operation.

SpaceWire-Monitor by Dynamic Engineering captures all of the data on a SpaceWire link and stores to files in memory. You can see which device sent what data and when allowing you to track down the issue and to validate proper operation. Data is time tagged to allow for analysis and alignment. Streaming and bursted applications are supported. Multiple formats with PCI, PCIe, PMC, and PCI-104 modules.

To operate insert SpaceWire-Monitor between the two nodes to be monitored. The link passes through SpaceWire Monitor allowing operation with or without data capture enabled. Handy as you can leave your set-up alone. Monitor start-up is programmable to handle starting with the link down or the link up and operating. Data is captured from the first byte or at the next packet boundary depending on the situation.

When enabled the received character streams are decoded and superfluous characters removed [NULL, FCT etc.] before storage to local memory. Each port has 64 Mbytes of FIFO. The Monitor application handles the interrupt from each received packet by programming a DMA transfer from the SpaceWire HW to the user defined file associated with storage. The SpaceWire Monitor HW continues to capture more data while the DMA transfers are happening in parallel. With the large buffer full link speeds can be used as well as large packet sizes. Data is stored as Binary to speed storage. A conversion utility is provided to provide a human readable output for post processing.

To complete your SpaceWire Monitor installation you will need a second cable and memory. SpaceWire cables are not included in the SpaceWire-Monitor package to allow our clients to select whatever length they require for their application. SpaceWire-Monitor will operate with either Type A or Type AL standard SpaceWire cables. Please add to your order. Memory to store your captured data is also not provided. Dynamic Engineering recommends HDD with cache [32 MB or similar] or NVMe internal memory to provide full rate streaming data capture without lost packets.


SpaceWire Monitor Block Diagram