Open AccessHigh-Speed Reconfigurable Free-Space Card-to-Card Optical Interconnects
Author(s) -
Ke Wang,
Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas,
Christina Lim,
Efstratios Skafidas,
Kamal Alameh
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
ieee photonics journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.725
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1943-0655
pISSN - 1943-0647
DOI - 10.1109/jphot.2012.2210198
Subject(s) - engineered materials, dielectrics and plasmas , photonics and electrooptics
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.