High-speed reconfigurable free-space card-to-card optical interconnects

Document Type

Journal Article

Faculty

Faculty of Computing, Health and Science

School

Electron Science Research Institute / Centre of Excellence for MicroPhotonic Systems

RAS ID

14213

Comments

Wang, K., Nirmalathas, A., Lim, C., Skafidas, E., & Alameh, K. (2012). High-speed reconfigurable free-space card-to-card optical interconnects. IEEE Photonics Journal, 4(5), 1407-1419. Available here

Abstract

A reconfigurable free-space-based card-to-card optical interconnect architecture employing MEMS-based steering mirror arrays in conjunction with VCSEL and photodiode arrays is proposed and demonstrated in this paper. Theoretical studies and simulations indicate that error-free [bit error rate (BER) of < 10 -6] optical interconnects with a range on the order of tens of centimeters can be achieved, and the major factors limiting the performance are the VCSEL beam divergence and interchannel optical crosstalk. The tradeoff between the BER performance and the channel spacing of the receiver MEMS mirror array is also investigated. A proof-of-concept 3 × 10 Gb/s reconfigurable optical interconnect architecture is developed, demonstrating a BER of ∼ 10 -6 and a receiver sensitivity better than ∼ -11.5 dBm. Both the port-to-port and board-to-board reconfigurability of the proposed architecture are also experimentally demonstrated, opening the way for attaining higher throughputs through highly dense 3-D parallel optical interconnects.

DOI

10.1109/JPHOT.2012.2210198

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free_to_read

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