FPGA Implementation of Multi-RT Protocol for Avionics Simulation

Abstract

MIL-STD-1553B bus is widely used as a primary bus in many avionics, satellite and military applications. As the number of subsystems increasing on the 1553B bus, increases complexities in the communications due to interdependency. Operational testing of these systems during system integration is a challenging task and requires data from multiple systems. Thus, the availability and readiness of subsystems are essential. In the absence of subsystems, 1553B based Remote Terminal (RT) simulator hardware can act as a real-time system to replicate the functionality of the individual subsystem. Hardware and development cost of the system goes high with the number of RTs to simulate in current scenario. The proposed solution describes the design of simulating 32 RTs using a single 1553B node and introduces a four node 1553B card based on ARTIX FPGA, which simulates 4x32 RTs. It is compact, low-cost and low power solution for providing real-time 1553B RT communication, which meets requirements of an avionics application to large extent.