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Your taskSerial buses have become ubiquitous for data commu-nications on aircraft and spacecraft. While many of the standards have been around for decades, they still present challenges and have to be tested to ensure reliability under all conditions. Physical layer problems can cause incorrectmessages to be read at the receiver, or an incorrectsequence of events can confuse the receiver.

Reliability is especially important, particularly in avionics.To ensure the reliability of control and communicationsbuses, each design and subsystem has to meet certaincriteria that are typically defined in a standard such asMIL-STD-1553.

In addition to testing whether electrical parameters com-ply with the standard, the communications performance of the entire bus system has to be verified. Therefore, reliabil-ity tests are essential during development and later onduring installation and maintenance of bus systems.

Having a tool that allows you to time-correlate the physicallayer to the actual decoded messages going across thelink can give you more confidence in your design. All with-out the tedious task of manually decoding the bus.

T&M solutionThe R&S®RTE and R&S®RTO oscilloscopes provide apowerful tool for debugging low speed serial buses by turning the scope into a protocol analyzer with the ability to see the time-correlated analog waveforms at the same time.

Avionic and aerospace specific busesThe complexity and requirements of aircraft data networks(ADN) have greatly increased over the years. Starting withanalog, point-to-point connected systems, there are now anumber of standard buses for the avionics and aerospaceindustries. Some, such as ARINC 429 and MIL-STD-1553, have been around for decades. Others, such as Space-Wire, are relatively new, and still others are proprietary. TheR&S®RTE and R&S®RTO oscilloscopes support all of these buses.

The R&S®RTE and R&S®RTO oscilloscope families from Rohde & Schwarz provide an in-depth tool for debugging custom and off-the-shelf serial buses for the avionics and aerospace industries.

Debug standard and proprietary serial buses in aerospace and avionic systems

The R&S®RTO oscilloscope triggers and decodes continuous SpaceWire

data streams.

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Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG

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PD 3607.4841.92 | Version 01.00 | June 2016 (GK)

R&S®Gerätename; Debug standard and proprietary serial buses in aerospace and avionic systems

Data without tolerance limits is not binding | Subject to change

© 2016 - 2016 Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG | 81671 Munich, Germany 3607

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ARINC 429 and MIL-STD-1553Both standards were drafted in the 1970s and are stillwidely used in the civil (CAS) and military (MAS) aero-space sectors. While ARINC 429 is defined for data ratesup to 100 kbits/s, MIL-STD-1553 supports higherdata rates up to 1 Mbit/s. Besides other parameters, theMIL-STD-1553 differs in that it has a dual-redundant and bidirectional communications structure.

SpaceWireSpaceWire (SpW) is a more recent technical standard usedon spacecraft. It provides high-speed links and networkswith data rates up to 200 Mbit/sec and more. The standardis based on the IEEE 1355-1995 standard and has been adapted to requirements in space with respect to robust-ness, power consumption and EMC. The challenge of decoding a SpW data stream is the missing package iden-tifier that is typically used as trigger. SpW also has a hand-shake, but if no errors occur, data transmission can be a gapless and patternless series of bits.

Rohde & Schwarz has developed a new synchronizationalgorithm that enables triggering on a continuous SpWdata stream. The trigger conditions include control frames, data patterns, NULL frames, time codes and errorconditions. The R&S®RTE and R&S®RTO oscilloscopesare the first to support triggering and decoding of a con-tinuous SpaceWire data stream.

Proprietary busesProprietary buses based on Manchester or NRZ codedprotocols are also common for data and communicationsbus systems in aerospace and avionics systems. A generictrigger and decode solution for such buses has tradition-ally been challenging. The R&S®RTE and R&S®RTO oscillo-scopes address this challenge by being able to trigger anddecode Manchester and NRZ coded serial buses with datarates up to 5 Gbit/s.

SummaryThe powerful, easy-to-use R&S®RTE and R&S®RTO digitaloscilloscopes are ideal for verifying the electrical parame-ters of standard and proprietary serial buses and for moni-toring and debugging entire bus systems. Their ability totrigger and decode continuous SpaceWire data streams makes them particularly suited for the aerospace and avi-onics industry.

R&S®RTE and R&S®RTO key features for serial trigger and decode ❙ Fast oscilloscope update rates in excess of 1,000,000 waveforms per second

❙ Fast update rates due to hardware-based, protocol-specifi c decoding

❙ Accurate analysis due to hardware-based, protocol-specifi c trigger functionality

❙ Effi cient utilization of scope memory with history mode and segmented memory

❙ Ultra-deep memory with up to 2 GSample for long data acquisitions

SpaceWire decode on the R&S®RTO oscilloscope

showing data and control characters, control

codes and error messages of a continuous data

stream.

See alsowww.rohde-schwarz.com/product/RTOwww.rohde-schwarz.com/product/RTE

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