A new high speed data bus is urgently needed in military aircraft to offset the dramatic increase in dedicated wiring harnesses and to accommodate the need for greater information flow, resource sharing, and fault tolerance.
To satisfy that need the Air Force has awarded the High Speed Bus Technology Development contract to develop and validate high speed digital bus network designs, including T/R units, bus couplers, and media operating at 50 megabits per second.
Under that contract a linear token-passing bus is being implemented in both wire and fiber optics. Present technology does not allow the fiber-optic bus to be implemented as a linear random access bus, therefore it is being implemented as a star. The definition of both buses resulted from a number of analyses to determine the practical limits of a linear wire bus and a fiber-optic star.
A special feature of the bus being developed is that the basic terminal is compatible with both wire and fiber-optic media.