Development status of the Instrument Control Unit for the X-IFU instrument of the Athena mission

In this paper we describe the current development state of the Athena X-IFU Instrument Control Unit and its Application Software. Athena is a ESA Large mission scheduled for launch in the early 2030s, that has reached the Instrument requirement review phase. Not all of the needed functionalities are frozen yet, but the baseline concept and implementation will be described. While the hardware part will be based on well developed solution, some of the software functionalities, in particular the OBCP engine, will need to be developed and qualified. We will describe our approach for development and testing. The X-IFU instrument will use a Spacewire network for communications with the Platform and internally between the ICU and the other subsystems, with the ICU providing the routing capabilities for Housekeeping telemetry and telecommand as well as the scientific data. We will describe some aspects of the implementation of such a network.