Fiber optic backplane for reducing HIRF effects in fault tolerant computing platforms

The design and development of a fault-tolerant fiber-optic backplane to reduce the effects of electromagnetic environments (EME) on flight critical computing platforms is presented. The backplane was developed at the NASA Langley Research Center, and is currently undergoing analysis, simulation, and tests. The simulation results of tests on the backplane in the advent of simulated High Intensity Radiated Fields (HIRF) induced faults are presented, and the fault recovery capability of the architecture is demonstrated. The architecture was designed, developed, and implemented using the Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC) Hardware Description Language (VHDL). The architecture was synthesized and implemented in hardware using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) on multiple Personal Computer (PC) boards.