Optical-fiber technology consortium awarded $3.4 million
A grou¥of six US organizations led by Rockwell (Thousand Oaks, CA) has been awarded $3.4 million by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The award is part of a $6 million, three-year program to use advanced optical-fiber communications technology to expand the information infrastructure. A significant increase in the amount of data transmitted is crucial to improving access to end-user applications on the "information superhighway." Besides Rockwell, the WEST consortium includes Ortel Corp. (Alhambra, CA), the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech/JPL, Pasadena, CA), and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Santa Barbara (UCSB), and San Diego (UCSD). The goal is to enhance the capacity of wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology and apply it to transmitters, receivers, and cross-switch modules. Modules are being developed to transmit u¥to four channels of 10 Gbit/s, for a total bandwidth of 40 Gbit/s.
The WEST project combines gallium arsenide heterojunction-bipolar-transistor (HBT) technology developed at Rockwell with Ortel`s high-speed lasers and detectors. Caltech/JPL and UCLA will link supercomputers at Caltech and JPL for a data-intensive distributed computing demonstration. Advanced lasers and network architectures will be developed at UCSB, which will also perform WDM link simulation, and UCSD will design and test HBT circuits, as well as develo¥optoelectronic integrated receivers.