This Phase I SBIR proposal offers an innovative approach for the enhancement of spaceborne fiber optic link data handling capability by taking full advantage of both the existing spaceborne flight data system capabilities and those associated with the new IEEE P1393 standard. The principle innovation is our proposed direct linkage of the currently existing serial fiber optic data bus networks and protocols with subsystem interconnects that take advantage of parallel optical fibers. A key advantage of using parallel optical data include reduced speed per fiber optic channel allowing designers to use low voltage CMOS, as opposed to GaAs that is required for channel speeds exceeding 200 Mbps. An eight bit implementation could provide data transfers of up to 1.6 Gbps while retaining low power consumption per channel. Our designs would also take advantage of very low power low threshold semiconductor lasers. In addition, the proposed linkage is dynamically reconfigurable based on load or fault conditions, significantly improving system performance and reliability. Finally, we propose to investigate the use of a scaleable data rate for the parallel link, based on using variations in the number of bit-channels and in the clock speed. Analysis will include performance impact and protocol requirements.
Potential Commercial Applications:The target market for the fiber optic gateway transceivers proposed is the rapidly growing area of communications and networks, specifically local area networks (LANs) and central office distribution. The gateways are ideal for the distribution of high speed serial data, high speed ATM/SONET for example, for rapid LAN handling. The link bottlenecks would be minimized due simply to the intra-LAN parallel data transfers with very low latency at each of the LAN nodes. In addition, the fault tolerant features of the proposed effort are of great importance to the telecom marketplace.
