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.