Air Transport

COTSWORKS’ mission is to help our customers move from copper networks to fiber optic ones in military, aerospace, and other rugged markets. This process takes years and lots of work but its worth it for the weight savings fiber optic technology provides. The copper cables are 7x the weight of fiber optic ones and require heavy shielding as it runs thru the plane. And since copper cabling carries electricity, the possibility of sparks and even fiber exist so those wires (ones with power) can only be run in specific places. Fiber optic cable is totally passive so installation takes place in any areas of the plane.

When I see airplanes like the Anatov 225 carrying compressors the size of my house, I realize that weight savings don’t matter to everyone. You can see pictures of the airplanes visit to buffalo, NY here.

The cockpit looks like a cold war relic and I doubt there are any strain sensors in wings. They even carry their own replacement wheels on board. But, who knows, maybe there is a crewmember in the back watching HD TV movies…

As technology has developed, there was a feeling that it made the world smaller. We can see now, however, that it’s the same size…just very interconnected. The last two weeks of news have made us feel that more than ever and at the extremes of good and bad news.

In Aviation news, Boeing now has hundreds of 737Max planes on backlog including its biggest order ever for 200+ planes. that order came just after an $18 billion order for Boeing 777s. In the space of 10 days, Boeing booked orders for more than the entire state of Ohio exports for all manufacturing goods in one year. Should anyone not see the direct and strategic importance of Aviation to USA jobs, they need only review these two orders. The order for 737s puts boeing on even footing with Airbus on their single aisle jets but the real story is the airline, Lion Air. Not a household name for sure, Lion Air is an Indonesian airline started by very average guys. You can read more on their website if you want the details but the most striking things about Lion and the order are that a pair of guys from Indonesia are showing as much chutzpah and entrepreneurial spirit as any Silicon Valley elite might. And, that this kind of commerce, billions of bank funding and growth, are coming from a developing country whose primary religion is Islam which under some forms, prohibits interest on loans. Nevertheless, Lion is financing billions and with its new more efficient jets, not only going to serve Indonesia, but cause chaos in the entrenched Asian market.

Starting with chaos, the floods of Thailand took out a manufacturing facility at Fabrinet. Publicly traded under the NASDAQ FN, this is a company that deserves a close look. They have vertically integrated optical component manufacturing from making cases, to boards, to lasers, to packaging and testing. All under one roof – but within that roof, most of the big names in the transceiver business have small shops for their product sets. Competitors right next to each other all building in the same…building! China and Taiwan still have claim to a lot of the optical business, but Fabrinet is the clearing house. So you might think that 5’ of water in a factory that makes lasers would be bad but it isn’t to Fabrinet. They had already started work on a new factory and will have a better home in just a few months. The reports I read and saw show workers on 12 and 16 hour shifts to get the new factory running. It looks like the USA in the late 40s and 50s of last century.

There are two sides to every event. Huge orders for new efficient airplanes means existing airlines could be in trouble. A natural disaster gives rise to new state of the art manufacturing and growth. We can count on these types of events happening again and just as with optics, it will happen faster and faster.

DEMO

What’s the difference between a COTSWORKS transceiver and an industry standard transceiver?

Why do our products cost more?

Wider Temperature.
Our transceivers operate at Industrial Temperature as a minimum. We often go beyond this higher or lower temperatures. The lasers inside the parts need to be calibrate and tuned and tested to work at these wide temperature ranges so there is extra work and value in making the transceivers operate this way.

They are more rugged.
Companies like Curtiss Wright and GE have “Ruggedization Levels” which show the varying levels of extra support in their embedded cards. For us, this means the parts are put together with more precision and tighter tolerances. It means we use screws to hold the parts together as well as down to the boards. It means we conformally coat the parts with Parylene so they can withstand moisture and corrosive environments. It means we use more copper in our PCBs so they are stronger and better shielded.

Better Performance.
Our parts operate with a higher output power, better sensitivity, and less drift across temperature. We see aspects of this in various products from the big transceiver companies but we incorporate all of them into each of our transceivers. We use lasers that pass several layers of screening for true component level testing. What ships in a COTSWORKS transceiver is the best we can make it with the best parts we can buy. They are also smaller…our RJs are almost 1/3 the size of an SFP.

Support.
When you call us, you speak directly to an engineer. Often, that engineer helps in the design or assembly of the products we make. In fact, every employee of COTSWORKS has worked in the production area. Our new director of International Sales, Roberta Pina, just finished her first fiber cable. And me? Apparently cables I made when I was learning are still in Production (and they work, yes, they work). Our transceivers aren’t industry standard pluggables, they are board-soldered parts so we are involved in the design of your product and the support of it in the field.

Integration.
Building an LRU means incorporating many disciplines. We build our own transceiver boards, sheet an cast metal cases, cabling, and even test equipment. While we have optical and electrical engineers, we also have mechanical and system engineers. And, for a small company, we have more application engineers than salespeople. From start to finish we try to engineer a solution that helps our customers go from copper to fiber in their box level I/O.
In the last few months we started to go to tradeshows, the Paris Airshow and an IFE show. The DEMO box that we had shows standard transceivers and our products. Made to look like an LRU, it has slot cards and a backplane with a rugged 38999 on the front. Along with the cards and etched plastic, we had LEDs and a screen with an embedded computer. Everything was built by us showing that we have the capabilities to do this work and we really want to learn how to help our customers succeed with the real thing.

Our newsletter is now in its third year and as we’re growing, we’re getting better at updating it and adding content. This blog, Counting Photons, goes along with the newsletter and even sometimes out on its own. I look forward to the day where the word “blog” goes away and we call a web page a web page partially because I don’t like the word “blog” and partially because and online editorial is just that…an online editorial!


It’s been a very hot summer here in the Midwest with near 100 degree days and 80 degree nights. But the cool breeze that comes off of Lake Erie and up over the Heights to my house has made the evenings wonderful. My kids have practiced piano, Cello, and Bass out on the front lawn; I’ll never clean up all the water balloon pieces we’ve created, and somewhere around 3-4 pounds of cherry pits now rest beneath the ivy on the sides of our lawn. I’m lucky to get those evenings because COTSWORKS has been booming. We’ve had some of our best months on shipments and added some wonderful new staff. Our crop of interns has been great with students from Yale, Smith, CWRU, BGSU, and Cleveland State. Several will be continuing part time this fall and I hope joining us full time after graduation.


The interns have built some great products including automating our conformal coater, helping update our new Star Trek door, and washing our ESD smocks (they are interns after all). Our new engineers have been working on several new transceivers including some multi-channel work and 10Gbps parts. I’m really excited about the new transceivers as we have invented new ways of handling fiber, installing transceivers, and making parts rugged from the start. We’ve also started to work on our multi-channel parts.




Transceivers operate using two OSAs in their industry standard form. Multi-channel parts switch to arrays of parts. OSAs use 1.25 or 2.5mm ferrules…the same as a typical fiber cable. Multi-channel parts use fiber ribbons to line up with the arrays. The tolerances here are microns and it is truly amazing that any of this stuff works once to say nothing of making it work over a large production run and a long time. Use on the F-16 and other military programs have shown that this technology can work and offer our war fighters a tactical advantage by offering speed and protocol independent links to smart weapons and surveillance systems. Conferences such as the AVFOP have presented information on these kinds parts for several years. If you want to read more about embedded optics, Optical Interlinks has some very good pictures. Under the testimonials section, they list some of their customers including Stratos/Emerson. Photos on the web page do a very nice job showing what embedded optics look like.


Our product family name for our multi-channel solutions is called HEMI or High End Multi Interface. The product set feature numerous advantages over existing card edge (SFP) or thru hole (SFF) parts from industry standard vendors. As fiber optics finds its way into more and more applications, we hope HEMI meets and exceeds the industry’s expectations.

Get Packing

I’m not at all happy about the merger between United and Continental airlines. It means two things: 1) the Continental staff will smile as much as the United staff now, 2) I have to fly through O’Hare more often. Both are dim prospects for a happy Clevelander. Keeping a smile on the faces of the staff and making flying as pleasant as possible is something you would think the airlines would try to do considering the usual accommodations we get. I hope the merger works out for the staff and things get better for United. As for O’Hare, the only way to fix that travel disaster is to move the airport. I’m here in Europe and with our Director of Development who flew from Ohare and lost a day and half due to weather. Some things, you can’t change.


The new 737 interior has arrived and its beautiful. Cramped in or not, delayed on the ground or not, it’s an improvement. Wider walls, easier baggage stowage, and LED lighting will make the experience of flying nicer. They also fixed a longstanding problem of passengers accidentally touching the flight attendant call button instead of the lights. While I haven’t seen the layout, this was a great thing to improve. Even with as much as I fly, I’ve hit the wrong button myself. Of course, on United, I’m afraid to hit the call button for fear of angering the flight attendant, but sometimes you do need help. It might seem like this was an easy thing to do, but changing wiring on an airplane is very hard to do.


The 737-8s are beautiful planes. For all the noise that Airbus is making with the NEO, it’s not taking 737 sales as the two airplanes are very different now with the 737 being larger. It’s surprising to see that no one has latched onto Bombardier’s C-Series yet and at this point, that’s a critical mass moving in the wrong direction. Down but not out, I think it’s going to force Boeing’s to have to build a new airplane that competes with the NEO, the C-Series, and the Sukhoi and 919. Single aisle competition is fierce and It will be very interesting to see what happens in a few years when China and its neighbors consume the 919 and Russia and its satellites consume the Superjet.


This trip to Europe and the stop at the Airshow in Paris reminded me of my last trip here a few months ago and a very special visit to Sweden. While I stayed at a normal hotel 10 minutes from the airport, staring at me out of the window was a retired Boeing 747 in a field. You can get there by car, bus, and even a backpack…it’s the local youth hostel! Definitely run down, but still beautiful in its bulge, the airplane now hosts dozens of trekkers who want cheap housing. While it is cool, to be honest, when I can get out of airplanes, I try to do so. Sleeping in them isn’t in my list of goals.


But others would disagree. Turning old airplanes into houses has a select group of fans behind it. There are old 707s and 727s pockmarked thru the world that are now homes. You can see them online if you search around. One very cool entry way is this one:





The Hotel Costa Verde overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica.
Photo: Hotel Costa Verde


It’s a hotel so you get the travel feel without the round walls. The clipped wings is a downer but functional. We’re not big enough yet to have our own airplane so we built something of our own as we expanded recently. Now encompassing about 10,000 square feet, the brand new Active Fiber Optics lab greets visitors when they arrive in our new entrance:




No cubicles…airplane. Custom built by the best construction team not actually building airplanes. Painted an appropriate ugly shade of green on the inside, several Agilent 86100 mainframes, and our own Optofy test gear, we can do active testing of wiring and systems using actual aviation cable, termini, connectors, and LRUs at speeds up to 10Gbps. Other facilities can test the cable or passives but we can now do both. It’s not our business to qualify components, but we’ve got some complicated development work coming up and now have a unique facility to design and test them. By the end of this year, we’ll have our RJ and SFF series fully released and qualified at temperatures better than Industrial rating, at 850nm and 1310nm, speeds of 100Mb to 4Gbps, and even some support for HD Video. All of the parts will have 2x the link budget of industry standards and be hold measurements more consistently across temperature. The maximum speed rating of 4Gbps will be just a rated limit as the designs of the 850nm will operate at 10Gbps and will be packaged for release at that speed and in a new form factor in Q1 of 2012.


Trains are next on our list to upgrade. I never thought I’d hear engineers who design wiring for locomotives worry about weight, but it seems that running all those wires for ITE (In-Train Entertainment) and other systems weighs a lot and can be an EMI issue. Can you imagine a 10Gbps fiber optic backbone travelling at 100 MPH and configured in any kind of weather?

Can you see me now?

Can you see me now?

The first thing to do when defining any optical network is determine the link budget and link loss.

Optical networks are made up of incredibly advanced elements such as semiconductor lasers, flexible glass fibers, diamond polished termini, and precision metal connectors. While the materials and detail could merit calling them jewelry, the beauty of an optical network is not in the component’s complexities but in the overall simplicity. We can take all the advanced technology that companies like Finisar and JDSU can throw at us, and reduce its practice to a simple question: what’s the link budget?

Light is both a wave and particle and we have to wrestle this immaterial state of existence to several absolute ones we can manage: output power and receiver sensitivity measured in dBm, and the delta, or dB. Link budgets are based on these measurements coupled with the loss that occurs along the path.

A dB is an abbreviation for a decibel (it stands for one tenth of a bel). 10s are a nice base unit for how we see light as our perception of it at one power and our perception of it at 10x that power is twice as bright. This is helpful to keep in mind as we go from millwats (mW) to Watts which as the prefix shows, is done in powers of ten. Much as we might regret giving engineers control, there are reasons things work the way they do in our world and math is at the heart of much of it. We’re going to use watts behind the scenes much as a transceiver does in taking electrical power in and putting optical power out.

The simple question of whether an optical network or link will work is based on staying within the link budget, again, measured in dB. It’s a relative measurement to the two dBm measurements…which are absolute of output power and receiver sensitivity. We switch from milliwats (very small amounts of light compared to your lightbulbs and in our cases, not visible) to dBm because we can get to a nice linear counting scheme. Since light transmission is all about loss, we have a measurement point at Zero dBm which is also 1mW. And here we have one more transition: going from one to two milliwatts is the same as increasing 3 dB or 1 dBm to 4 dBm. Every 3 db up or down is a doubling or halving of optical power.

Transceivers have largely abstracted the end user from the milliwatts portion of this problem solving but it’s important to remember it because transceivers like cotsworks’ are designed onto a board and they have to have clean power supplies. If not, you can see how the campbell’s soupcan effect can ruin your end link…milliwatts to dBms to dBs to changes of just 3 dB reducing network efficiency by ½. Thankfully, the loss on glass is very low and the transceivers can operate from 1 to 1/1000^th of their rated light received. And even that number isn’t enough as we add connectors and expanded beam or rotary joints or just increase our speed which reduces the efficiency of the receiver. One of the things that make our transceivers rugged is that they exceed industry standards at room and extended temperature. Our SX parts, for example are nearly 2x what the industry standard calls out. This doesn’t mean you can avoid calculating link budgets…just that we have a little extra pad to help out in harsh environments.

Finally, Fiber Optics In The 787

The use in fiber optics in avionics is now a decade or more old but the use of the technology is still limited and in its infancy. Several European projects, the Boeing 777, and a few military applications have led the field so far. The 777 used fiber for a communication link back in the 1990s. The fiber optic cable chosen, however, had production issues and all the technology had to be removed. Maybe there is a chance to get fiber optics back in the 777 as the ups and downs of fiber optics is not alone to aerospace. A lot of companies still sell 100base media converters for Fiber To the Desk applications that were designed in back in the late 90s also. Their use and benefits rise and fall with the price of copper.

But things have matured. Conferences such as the Avionics In Fiber Optics, AVFOP IEEE event are now several years old. Mark Beranek of Navair does a great job creating an engaging list of topics and the list of attendees and exhibitors has continued to grow over several years. Other conferences such as SPIE or Autotestcon now also include fiber optic presentations. and while conferences are nice, the use of fiber optics is what matters. Fighter Jets such as the F-18, F16, and F-22 are all using fiber as are cargo planes such as the C-130 and A400. There are now dozens of platforms and dozens of years of use.

The big applications though so far have been In-Flight Entertainment. Lumexis, Panasonic, and Thales use fiber to reduce the weight of their aftermarket upgrades. Hundreds of fibers offer hundreds of pounds of weight savings as well as limitless bandwidth. With all this rich history now run throughout airframes, it is time for a major platform to use fiber for more than sending jaggy videos or music to headphone jacks that are often partially broken.

Enter the 787.

We’ve been waiting nearly three years and unfortunately have to wait another six months or so to see the first one fly off to Japanese premier carrier ANA. Boeing presented an overview of the maintenance advances in the 787 recently and stuck in the middle of the presentation was a once proprietary picture:

You can find the whole presentation on line including the number of links and the length of fiber deployed. 70% less weight than copper, over 1 mile of cabling, and running at speeds that are very hard to do on copper and almost impossible on copper wire in aerospace.

The last slide is a beautiful picture of the airplane flying with wings arcing back, and a lighter and more reliable airframe than has ever been made.