For aeronautic applications, in-service Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a now established as a key technique to assess the performance and the integrity of composite aircraft structures for real-time in situ monitoring. For 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 are to bring the benefits of optoelectronics to aircraft and satellite data communications supporting multiple payload networks over a lighter and a more modular physical layer, thereby improving performance (connectivity, flexibility, bandwidth and number of channels). Especially, the development of a multi-channel high data rate transceiver (25 Gbps per channel) and the very dedicated optical test bench oriented to qualify and establish the probabilistic reliability model of such products and systems have been challenging and very innovative regarding the current state-of-the-art.
RYTHMS project defines tools and methodology to validate and certify such fiber-based systems in compliance with the general requirements of DO-160 standard and Space Quality Standards.
Through a complementary consortium involving industrial partners and academics as well as a large knowledge and heritage from their expertise in high data rate optical datacom and telecommunication devices and systems, RYTHMS project has established a set of requirements to characterize the performance, environmental and reliability needs that can drive the final design of an optoelectronic transceiver module. A generic test bench platform has been designed and implemented to carry out both an extensive set of electro-optical characterizations and an optimized program of accelerated tests to predict the reliability of the optical transceiver modules depending on operating conditions and mission profiles.
