Regenerative polymeric bus architecture for board-level optical interconnects.
A scalable multi-channel optical regenerative bus architecture based on the use of polymer waveguides is presented for the first time. The architecture offers high-speed interconnection between electrical cards allowing regenerative bus extension with multiple segments and therefore connection of an arbitrary number of cards onto the bus. In a proof-of-principle demonstration, a 4-channel 3-card polymeric bus module is designed and fabricated on standard FR4 substrates. Low insertion losses (≤ -15 dB) and low crosstalk values (< -30 dB) are achieved for the fabricated samples while better than ± 6 µm -1 dB alignment tolerances are obtained. 10 Gb/s data communication with a bit-error-rate (BER) lower than 10(-12) is demonstrated for the first time between card interfaces on two different bus modules using a prototype 3R regenerator.
Electrical Engineering Division, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, 9 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA, UK. nb301@cam.ac.uk
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N
Bamiedakis
A
A
Hashim
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RV
Penty
I H
IH
White
D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D008027:Light; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D012031:Refractometry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012542:Scattering, Radiation; D020349:Surface Plasmon Resonance / Q000295:instrumentation*
D011108:Polymers