Design and implementation of FC-AE fault simulation instrument

With the development of integrated avionics technology, higher requirements are put forward for the transmission speed and bandwidth of the interconnection bus. To tackle with these problems, FC-AE protocol is proposed, which has the advantages of high data bandwidth and is also suitable for long-distance transmission. In order to accelerate the process of designing and developing FC-AE (Fiber Channel Aerospace) devices and building FC-AE systems, we developed a portable FC-AE fault simulation instrument. This instrument can simulate the failure in the bus transmission path between two FC-AE instruments at three rates, which can be used to verify the fault tolerance and error handling program of the system. This paper shows the simulation project and development scheme of the fault simulation instrument firstly. After that, this paper introduces the design of logic firmware based on FPGA in detail, especially the logic design of frame/word trigger and fault simulation under four sets of trigger conditions. Finally, in order to verify whether the function of the instrument is normal or not, we built a test platform with different communication rates, and conducted fault simulation tests. The test results show that the FC-AE fault simulation instrument can meet the requirements of the proposed technical performance, and can reconstruct the fault in the process of system maintenance, which is of great significance to test the stability and reliability of an FC-AE system.