Polymer optical fibers for computer board and back-plane interconnections

Yao Li; Jun Ai; Jan Popelek

doi:10.1117/12.386802

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24 May 2000 Polymer optical fibers for computer board and back-plane interconnections

Yao Li, Jun Ai, Jan Popelek

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Proceedings Volume 4089, Optics in Computing 2000; (2000) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.386802
Event: 2000 International Topical Meeting on Optics in Computing (OC2000), 2000, Quebec City, Canada

Abstract

We discuss needs for using large-bandwidth, EMI-free optical interconnects inside computer systems and why the back-plane is the first possibility of applying optical technology. We compare free-space and guided-wave optical solutions for various fundamental and practical measures and show our conclusion that 2D data-capable guided wave optical channels can offer most competitive solutions. We capitalize on various unique advantages that a polymer optical fiber offers and propose to combine such fibers and embedding techniques we developed to deliver reliable optical channels on conventional printed circuit boards and back-planes. We show that an embedded polymer fiber opticaldistribution circuit can effectively deliver low-loss and high uniformity clock data up to 10Gb/s. We extend the concept of embedding to the multi-layer point-to-point 2D parallel optical back-plane. To further extend the capability of these optical data highways to incorporate data-sharing functionality, compact and integrated free-space optical components are proposed to serve as image-splitting devices. We discuss various recent experiments in our lab and present several demonstration prototypes during our presentation.

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Yao Li, Jun Ai, and Jan Popelek "Polymer optical fibers for computer board and back-plane interconnections", Proc. SPIE 4089, Optics in Computing 2000, (24 May 2000); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.386802

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