Electronic multiprocessor with radiation-hardened optical interconnects

Optical interconnects will play an increasingly significant role in future space applications, because of their high transmission bandwidth potential and radiation hardness. This paper presents the development results of a hybrid optoelectronic system comprising four electronic processing boards that communicate through an optical 3 by 3 non- blocking crossbar switch. Each processing board contains Tx and Rx modules pigtailed to multimode fibers. An optical fan-out of 1-to-3 is implemented by means of a holographic grating. The fan-in is implemented as a lens array. The system has been tested using dedicated automatic target recognition (ATR) software, and space testing is planned.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.