Extended temperature characterization of COTS bi-directional (BiDi) transceivers for avionics applications

Recent advances in commercial-off-the-self (COTS) fiber optic transceivers have provided attractive new opportunities for avionics system designers to utilize this new generation of COTS transceivers to develop advanced avionics systems which have stringent requirements for high performance, light weight and low maintenance costs. On the other hand, COTS transceivers are generally not designed specifically to meet avionics environmental requirements. Avionics system designers are facing with a new challenge in selecting the best COTS transceivers, which meet the system cost and performance objectives. Before starting a rigorous qualification test process, a strategy to down select COTS transceivers for specific avionics systems is to utilize extended temperature range testing to identify robust COTS transceivers for avionics system applications. In this paper, we describe some of the extended temperature characterization results for COTS bi-directional (BiDi) transceiver at 125 Mb/s.