Optical Switching Fabric

The major requirements for this program include the modeling of optical switching fabric technologies appropriate to space-borne systems at very high speed. Specifically, this program will evaluate two OptiComp candidate optical transceiver technologies against a Serial Rapid IO switching fabric. A down-selection to one optical transceiver technology will be made. Then, a simulation of that Serial Rapid IO and OptiComp optical transceiver switching fabric will be performed using a COTS-based FPGA and optical transceiver emulator. BENEFIT: The proposed SBIR program provides dual use commercialization opportunities for both military and commercial satellite applications. Despite the current market slowdown, the global market opportunity for optoelectronic systems is large and is expected to grow, especially in area requiring high-capacity data handling. Based on our integrated technology, OptiComp Corporation (OCC) is currently developing VCSEL-based optoelectronic switching modules for use in commercial local, metro, storage, and wide area fiber optic networks, as well as switching networks for military applications ranging from avionics to satellites.   OCCs CWDM switching architecture provides a high degree of fault tolerance and self routing, making it ideally suited for inter-satellite networks. This will further develop OCC routing and switching architecture for the specific requirements of intra-satellite networks. In particular, this will address issues such as fault tolerance, redundancy, scalability, and dynamic reconfiguration as well as the need to deal with burst data by utilizing VCSEL/detector pairs with coarsely spaced wavelengths.   The proposed effort is directly compatible with OptiComp''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''s other federal programs currently developing VCSEL-based technology for optical communications. In particular, this program directly leverages the companys current efforts to develop optical networks and interconnects for satellite applications. The development of compact CWDM transmitter and receiver technologies will provide small volume, high-capacity interconnectivity for military and commercial applications. This technology is especially applicable to satellite networks where size, weight, power consumption, and fault tolerance are primary considerations.