Radiation Hardened High Speed Fiber Optic Transceivers for Extreme Environments

We propose the development of transceiver offering wide bandwidth (1 Mbps to 10 Gbps) that operates in space environments targeted by NASA for robotic exploration. Fiber optics holds significant advantages over copper for high-speed data communications in space applicationsÂ? it neither produces nor is affected by EMI, it offers ground isolation between electronic units, reduced power, reduced size and reduced weight. Mil-airframes are increasingly fielding fiber optic wiring infrastructures as a long-term solution to bandwidth upgrades (for example, Joint Strike Fighter, Raptor, F-18 and B-2) [1]. Space systems are coming on-line that route 100's of signals with bandwidths greater than 1 Gbps [2, 3 and see Potential Post Applications below]. As NASA engineers forecast the spacecraft trends for increasing science data throughput and on-board processing, the use of fiber optic data links between spacecraft subsystems has gained considerable interest.