Radiation Hardened High Speed Fiber Optic Transceivers for Extreme Environments

This program develops fiber optic transceivers that offer wide bandwidth (1 Mbps to 10 Gbps) and operate in space environments targeted by NASA for robotic exploration. These environments require components that can operate over a much wider temperature range than available with commercial fiber optic technology. The goal of this research is to develop a process platform to create fiber optic components that operate in the space environment (radiation, temperature, vibration, etc.) and leverage commercial performance/protocols for data transmission. Our overall goal is to create the market availability of space fiber optic transceivers for backbone data communications operating on standard protocols. This will eliminate current cycle of NRE-funded transceiver developments. This is opportunity to provide significant government savings, and reduce risk and associate programs delays that occurred with highly customized fiber optic development.