Designing future technologies for in-flight entertainment
Plastic Optical Fibre (POF) are commonly known as 'consumer' optical fibres as both the fibre and associated optical links, connectors and installation are inexpensive. They are used for low-speed, short-distance applications including digital home appliance interfaces, home and car networks. More sophisticated designs are employed in higher speed applications, such as data centre or network wiring. Due to their promising capabilities for unique optical data management within the consumer market, the MOTIFES project focused on exploring POFs potential to be utilised for multimedia distribution in aircrafts. Researchers addressed many aspects of the POF system for developing a ruggedised product that is fully compliant to strict safety standards to be deployed in both aircraft and home. On the basis of consumer electronic IEEE 1394 serial bus comunication technology Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL) were designed, fabricated and characterised. Unlike conventional lasers, this type of semiconductor laser diode provides a laser beam emission vertical to the top surface. This characteristic results into significant decreases in fabrication costs of devices, as tests can be conducted on on-wafer before becoming individual devices. Unlike most edge-emitting lasers, VCSELs display a larger output aperture that produces a lower divergence angle of the output beam that offers high efficiency when coupling with optical fibres. Therefore, the newly fabricated red VCSELs aimed primarily for avionic applications have undergone several tests including environmental and lifetime testing, as well as failure analysis. Apart from the non-critical data transfer within an aircraft, the new, red VCSELs can potentially be used for data handling in automobiles, data storage and medical applications including therapy. Continued exploitation of the red-VCSEL technology has already been established with two MOTIFES partners. Yet, further collaborations are also sought with partners that might be a high-technology start-up particularly in the area of data communications.
