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.