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Chip-Scale Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CS-WDM)

Networks play an important role in the overall functioning of military weapons systems, and WDM technology offers many potentially substantial improvements to the performance of these networks as well as to the host platform. Currently available WDM components and systems are predominantly constructed of fiber-coupled, discrete components. While offering a large degree of flexibility in system design, this "macro-scale" approach to device integration gives the resulting WDM modules a volume or "footprint" that is much too large for emerging military platforms. Also, many of these WDM devices will only support network topologies that are either entirely static or capable only of very limited reconfiguration, usually only in the form of protection switching, not the provisioning of new services and functions. Another problem is that much of the available WDM component level technology has been designed for use in very high-speed digital optical communications networks. While suitable for the long-haul transport digital signals, it is rare for any of these devices to fully support both digital and analog data transmission requirements of military weapons systems and sensor networks.

A final obstacle to the use of conventional WDM components concerns temperature sensitivity. Some military platforms are severely limited in their ability to provide an environment with a stable temperature range or the power to support a large number of thermo-electric coolers. Future military platforms would see substantial benefit from WDM components that provide high levels of chip-scale integration, support dynamically reconfigurable topologies, offer data format independence (support different digital data types as well as the ability to simultaneously transport digital and analog data), and are temperature robust.