Potential opportunities for utilizing commercial optoelectronics in avionics fiber-optic networks

Industry studies indicate the feasibility of using both MCM-L/COB and silicon microbench passive alignment technology in harsh, high reliability environments such as military and commercial avionics systems. Moreover, in many cases, if proper design, materials, and packaging approaches, and assembly and quality assurance procedures are utilized, both MCM-L/COB and silicon microbench passive alignment technologies may actually enable design ad manufacturing of low cost avionics optoelectronics modules. Silicon microbench passive alignment packaging technology has been demonstrated for LED, PIN photodiode, VCSEL and edge emitting laser diode packaging. Although MCM-L/COB and silicon microbench passive alignment technologies have been shown to be ruggedizable for the avionics environment, additional reliability testing and infrastructure development work is required before they are implemented in real avionics systems. VCSELs and edge-emitting diode lasers can be reliably used in systems with excursions to high temperature avionics environments) if the total time-at-high temperature is kept modest. Simple temperature measuring circuits and laser diode drive current monitoring circuits for onboard diagnostics and maintenance could be implemented to ensure reliable operations of high-speed laser-based transmitters in the avionics environment