Designed the electronics and software for an Ethernet-managed optical amplifier.

Context

A large communications company required external electronic and firmware design services to develop a functional set of intelligent optical amplifier prototypes. After acceptance by the client, these prototypes were to be used to participate in a field trial being conducted by one of their larger Telco customers. One of the trial goals was to confirm the ability to geographically extend their current fiber optics network to more remote locations via the use of amplification.

Solution

BCA created an electronics design based on the Freescale Coldfire micro-controller, which provided amplification, monitoring, and diagnosis of two fiber optics interfaces (upstream and downstream). It also included flash memory and support for Ethernet & serial interfaces for device control.

BCA’s internal CAD layout of this design utilized careful signal quality practices as several of the design’s subsystems required very low resulting noise to operate properly.

This firmware solution utilized a cooperative multi-tasking kernel and included support for 1+1 redundancy and a 3rd party Light Weight Internet Protocol stack (LWIP), originally authored by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, which included SNMP and DHCP support. In addition, the firmware supported NetBSD’s TFTP client, flash memory management, and Ethernet & serial interface drivers.