Integrated components for fiber optic data links in industrial applications

Abstract With the development of low loss and relatively inexpensive optical fiber, many applications of fiber optic data transmission have become economically feasible. In contrast to the telecommunication applications which can justify the use of elaborate terminal circuitry to minimize the overall cost per channel-mile, industrial applications require terminal circuits which are inexpensive and widely applicable. The same interface circuits should accomodate the interconnection of both low rate asynchronous calculator-peripherals and high speed CPUs in a synchronous distributed computer network. This paper describes the performance and design trade-offs of the internal optical coding format, single chip integrated transmit and receive circuits, transducer module, source and detector, single fiber connector and cable of a 0–10 Mb/s over 0–100m and 0–15 Mb/s over 0–1 km, TTL compatible fiber optic data link. These components together constitute an easy to use, flexible and economical data transmission interface which can be mounted directly on a user's I/O printed circuit boards or panel.