For the past 20+ years today's Military air platform inventory have utilized Mil-Std1553 for data communications on all mission critical electronic systems. The maximum data transmission speed for these 1553 systems is 1 Megabit per Second (Mbps) on a wiring infrastructure comprised of Mil-Std C-17 Twinax (Shielded Twisted Pair) copper cabling with transformer coupling at each node. Although the standard is in current use, the data speeds have limited it to mission critical systems use exclusively. Ever since the inception of Mil-Std 1553 in the 1970s, these existing platforms have undergone sub-system upgrades and or sub-system expansion in an effort to extend lethality and performance. The addition of legacy and new sub-systems through the years has pushed bus loading to 90+%, which is beyond the safe loading limit of 50% to 60%. Operating in this unsafe zone has resulted in mission critical failures and has also halted further upgrades. Potential high speed data bus candidates for future upgrades of existing platforms require the same robustness and determinism as Mil-Std 1553 while achieving substantially higher data rates (100Mbps and above). In addition to increasing data rates, other important factors are maintaining current cable plants and their couplers, supporting existing protocols to reduce software impacts and incorporating digital voice and video on the same networks thus reducing costs, footprint, power and noise of analog voice and video The opportunity is to further develop a technology that is more commensurate with the performance seen in today's mainstream commercial applications, while developed from a military supplier base that still values military business and will maintain lifecycles for benefit of its customers that are more in line with the lifecyles of the platforms in which they will be deployed. As an added bonus, military platforms will get a lifecycle extension on the widely deployed Mil-Std-1553 bus infrastructure currently in place and platforms will get a 100 fold increase in bus bandwidth with the same absolute determinism and safety as today's Mil-Std-1553 technology. Sapphire Systems Inc. (SSI) is the Sister Company to MDI and exclusively markets the shared technology to all commercial sectors. SSI will deploy the first 100Mbps chipset for use in Home Phone Networking and is working in conjunction with a major data communications company for deployment. This chipset operates on house telephone wires and uses an Ethernet protocol. MDI uses the core technology with modifications to support all SAE requirements and more.
