Design of an Optical Applique Sensor Interface Module (O-ASIM)

摘要

To achieve the highest bandwidth performance in a plug-and-play system, optical interfaces offer scalability into eventually terabits/s in backplanes. The "on-ramps" to such backplanes come through interface modules. In simpler plug-and-play networks, these ASlMs have played this role in USB, SpaceWire, and inter-integrated circuit (I2C) copper-based bus physical layers. In this paper, we describe one possible implementation of an optical ASIM (O-ASIM), which integrates optical fibers into the earlier SpaceWire-based plug-and-play interface to provide dramatic enhancement to information transport. The present O-ASIM targets a 40Gbps performance, which is ~80X higher than the copper-only SpaceWire-based system. A sketch of a possible flight-qualifiable implementation is provided based on the use of 850nm transceivers and a Xilinx Virtex-6 field programmable gate array logic fabric.