Ruggedized photonic transceivers for spacecraft datalinks: SpaceFibre session, long paper

Commercial-off-the-shelf photonic components designed for datacenter or industrial applications do not typically satisfy the environmental ruggedness requirements of aerospace applications. In order to reduce costs and schedule risk for insertion of photonic components into these harsh-environment applications, we developed ruggedized photonic transceiver modules for aerospace fiber-optic datalink applications up to 5 Gbps. We then performed reliability and environmental testing to demonstrate that these modules meet or exceed many of the requirements of these applications. In this paper we present performance characteristics and results of reliability and environmental tests for these transceiver components.