This project is funded under the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which is designed to provide an opportunity for small business, particularly the small high technology firm, to participate in NSF research. Phase I of the SBIR program serves as a filter to select promising proposals and determine if the firm can do high quality research. Phase II is the principal research project. Phase III is the conversion of the NSF-funded research into commercial applications and technological innovation supported by follow-on private venture capital or other non-federal financing. This is a Phase I project to investigate a new type of low cost, high performance optical interconnection network: an intelligent bus extender crossbar network (IBECN). It involves combining fiber bus extenders with an electronic crossbar packet switch to network high-speed workstations. The fiber extender has been designed and studied under a Phase I SBIR grant from DOD, and a hardware prototype is being developed in Phase II. That project, however, involves only two workstations at a time. This research would allow more than two workstations to transfer data at 200 million bits per second over fiber lines. This transfer rate is approximately double that for current optical (FDDI) local area networks and, while less than for future gigabit networks, the cost of the switches is expected to be significantly cheaper than for either FDDI or gigabit equipment performing similar interconnection. There are extensive commercial applications in parallel computing, signal processing and telecommunications.
