730044RoBat RCI DevelopmentClosedLegacy RDA Grant for R&DInnovate UKPlease see attached document "New RCI Product Opportunity" for a full explanantion As the public demands more and more performance and services from the internet and mobile phones (particularly video )the data rates through the backplanes used in these systems has to increase. The current RoBAT S1 machine can confirm that backplanes which have data speeds in the low Gbps (Gigabits per second, 1 Gigabit= 10 to the power of9 bits)will work correctly when installed in a system. Much of telecommunications has recently moved up to 10 Gbps, there are plans to go to 40Gbps at the end of 2010 and some companies like Cisco Systems are already talking about 100+ Gbps. Companies like Agilent and T~ktronix already make MANUAL equiment (costing around GBP80K) for testing the transmission of these sorts of signals but nobody makes any AUTOMATIC equipment suitable for production volumes. Our own existing customers are telling us thi~ will become a necessity by the end of 2010. We plan to incorporate the Tektronix manual equipment into our existing machine chassis to produce an automatic machine. The difficulty which will have to be overcome is how to interconnect the Tektronix equipment with "RoBAT interface modules" stored in our machine and then subsequently with the backplane being tested without destroying the signal quality.