SBIR-STTR Award

The DoD has an emerging need for a data bus architecture which prevents communication protovol conflicits between legacy equipment and new (commercially developed) equipment on a variety of military platforms. It is not cost effective to continually upgrade legacy equipment to meet the lastest shift in protocol standards, but the new standards are necessary if the DoD is to leverage new technology which is being developed by the telecom (and other) industries in a cost effective manner. This problem can be addressed economically with an UDWDM network which provides a large number of separate optiical channels so that each protocol, and possible each piece of equipment, can have its own dedicated optical channel which provides a large electrical bandwidth that is free of constraints imposed by other protocols. A novel narrowband filter configuration utilizing a fiber Bragg grating and a low cost all-fiber circulator being developed at Tetra Tech Data Systems will provide the UDWDM filtering. Additionally, mixed signal buses will be enabled by isolating fragile analog signals from ditital signals with a combination of polarization and wavelength filtering (an extra 20 - 50 dB of isolation).

Keywords:
WAVELENGTH DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WDM) DENSE WDM (DWDM) ULTRA DENSE WDM (UDWDM) MIXED SIGNAL DATA B

The Air Force has an emerging need for a data bus/network topology which prevents communication protocol conflicts between legacy equipment and new (commercially developed) equipment on a variety of platforms. Continually upgrading legacy equipment to meet every shift in protocols is not cost effective, but the new protocols are necessary (in both network and bus topologies) if the Air Force is to leverage new technology being developed by the telcos. Tetra Tech Data Systems has developed a bi-directional, redundant UDWDM bus/network which supports multiple protocols, topologies and security levels by providing each protocol, topology, etc., with its own dedicated optical channel which provides a large electrical bandwidth that is free of constraints imposed by other topologies/protocols. To provide a larger number of channels, Tetra Tech successfully demonstrated in Phase I a novel, low cost, low insertion loss narrowband (1 GHz) fiberoptic filter utilizing fiber Bragg gratings. This filter will be utilized in Phase II to mux/demux UDWDM channels at a channel density 10 times greater than current WDM technology. To implement networks on the same fiber, but independently of the UDWDM bus, a low cost all-fiber circulator is being developed. Optionally, we will evaluate wide dynamic range analog signals on this bus.

Keywords:
NARROWBAND OPTICAL FILTER WAVELENGTH DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (WDM) DENSE WDM (DWDM) FIBER BRAGG GRATI