Recent development in High Power LED (HPL) is poised to replace traditional lighting sources such as Fluorescent, HID, Halogen and conventional incandescent bulbs in many applications. Due to the solid state compact nature of the light source it is inherently rugged and reliable and has been the favored lighting source for most indoor and outdoor applications including many hazardous locations that impact, and safety environments including mining, bridge, aerospace, and automotive . In order to accelerate this transition many enhancements and advances are taking place to improve on the reliability, and thermal performance of these devices.

With the use of large LED arrays, it is possible to generate large heat loads at the system level which can cause challenges for overall heat dissipation, especially when cooling requirements call for passive methods. These two challenges work together to cause elevated LED die temperatures, which have been linked to lower quantum efficiencies, shorter lifetimes, emission wavelength shifts and catastrophic device failure. It has been predicted previously that the lifetime of a device decays exponentially as the temperature increases. This can result in a lifetime decrease from 42,000 hours to 18,000 hours when the device temperature increases from 40°C to 50°C.

This paper explores the various improvements and advances made in the micro-packaging of LEDs to enhance their performance.

This paper will focus on the trends for the space-based lasers, optics and terminals used in the intersatellite networks. Reviewed and evaluate the recent development in the space-based laser technologies and the critical parameters that are employed for successful high-speed inter-satellite communications systems.

Building laser for high speed communications network for the harsh environment of space using optical links in space has proven to be complicated task and many such schemes were tried without success in the past. Space-based optical communications using satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) and Geo-synchronous orbits (GEO) hold great promise for the proposed Internet in the Sky network of the future. However in the last few years, there has been impressive progress made to bring the concept of laser-based intersatellite systems to fruition in civilian and government-non classified projects. Laser communications offer a viable alternative to established RF communications for inter-satellite links and other applications where high performance links are a necessity. High data rate, small antenna size, narrow beam divergence, and a narrow field of view are characteristics of laser-based systems and they are just few numbers of potential advantages for system design over radio frequency communication.

Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) technology is utilized for wide variety of applications for its easiness of handling and robustness against environmental variation. Thanks to its large core diameter (typically 1mm) and large numerical aperture (typically 0.5) which provides wider acceptance angle, dimensional tolerance of POF can be extremely large. This is the reason why the simple and low cost connection technology can be used with POF.

Among these existing applications, the POF manufactures are primarily focusing on growing automotive and industrial data-com areas. Industrial data-com applications include field-bus system in plant area, power application (power station, sub-station) and locomotive control systems. Automotive data-com with POF is used for In-vehicle networks for infotainment systems or safety information bus.

For these applications, POF is required to be durable against harsh environment such as high temperature (~105C), dynamic mechanical movement for robotic arms and compatibility with machine oil or other chemical substances. To satisfy these application specific requirements, the structure and material of POF and its jacketing are optimally designed. Through these development activities, POF technology evolved into well adopted industrial standard. As an extension of this evolution, aero space application is another great possibility to challenge for POF industry.

The present paper reports the latest technology and the features of those jacketed POF used in these applications, and describe about future possibility for aerospace applications.