Detail Project and Funding

Abstract: As ‘backplane’ is usually meant as the inter-connection plate, made of composite material, on which the various subsystems of a telecommunication system are merged. The BACKOP project is aimed at verifying the industrial feasibility of a backplane for communication networks that are able to support a large variety of tranmission protocol technologies, from the TDMto Ethernet, MPLS or IP. On an optical backplane, instead, the interconnection signals between different subsystems are sent through optical fibers, that replace the traditional metallic tracks. Indeed, the fiber-optic transmission avoids em interferences between adjacent channels while it reduces the energy required to transmit the information over the connection length. Such features envisage future backplanes that rely on an all-optical technology that will increase the transmission volume and decrease the absorbed power, for a fixed length and cost. Therefore, we plan to devise and develop some optical backplane prototype, using standard production technologies, which can also be implemented for large-scale production. The project will provide information on the actual feasibility of an industrial-grade backplane, also in terms of performance. The optical connections between backplanes and internal boards will be ensured by innovative connectors, which will be designed and fabricated within the project activity in order to optimize their compatibility with existing standards. The prototypes will be validated and analyzed in terms of reliability for industrial use.

INO’s Experiments/Theoretical Study correlated:
Evanescent-wave sensing and spectroscopy
Physical sensing with optical-fiber ring, grating-based and coupled resonators

The Scientific Results:
1) Sensitive strain measurements with a fiber Bragg-grating ring resonator
2) Investigation of fiber Bragg grating based mode-splitting resonant sensors
3) Split-mode fiber Bragg grating sensor for high-resolution static strain measurements