Overview
For aeronautic applications, in-service Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is now established as a key technique to assess the performance and the integrity of composite aircraft structures for real-time in situ monitoring. In space industry, the Assembly Integration and Test including Electrical Ground Support Equipment is an essential tool enabling a satellite or space launcher developer to integrate and validate the electrical functions of its spacecraft before the launching process. In addition, satellite operators and worldwide SatCom manufacturers are willing to improve the on-board processing capacity, functionality and flexibility. In this context, opto-transceiver technology becomes a major building block regarding the highlighted aeronautic, space and ground telecommunication needs.
The RYTHMS project aims to bring the benefits of optoelectronics to aircraft and satellite data communications supporting multiple payload networks and improving performance (connectivity, flexibility, bandwidth, and number of channels). Especially, the development of a multi-channel high data rate transceiver (25 Gb/s per channel) will be demonstrated thanks to a dedicated optical test bench in order to establish the probabilistic reliability model of such products.
To satisfy this very innovative challenge and to push back the frontiers of the current state-of-the-art, RYTHMS’ consortium involves industrial partners and academics holding the adequate heritage to elaborate and validate reliability model of high data rate optoelectronic transceivers for use in Aeronautics and Space systems. RYTHMS will develop an advanced generation of optoelectronic transceiver modules, a generic test bench platform and tools and methodology to validate such modules in compliance with the general requirements of DO-160 Standard. A set of extensive electro-optical characterization tests and an accelerated tests DoE optimized program to predict the transceiver reliability will be carried out.