Prospects of a polymer-waveguide-based board-level optical interconnect technology

In the long-distance telecom, local-area, and rack-to-rack link classes, optical interconnects have gradually replaced electrical interconnects. We believe that this trend will be continued in the short-distance card-backplane-card datacom link class. Convincing arguments for the predicted transition from electrical to optical interconnects are bandwidth-length advantages, density benefits, crosstalk reduction, and finally cost considerations. Based on this forecast, we currently develop a board-level optical interconnect technology facing several challenges, such as I) the manufacturing of reliable polymer waveguides, II) the elaboration of simple light-coupling concepts, III) the development of high-speed electro-optical modules, and IV) the application of cost-efficient packaging approaches. The successful mastering of all these tasks is a prerequisite for convincing high-speed system designers and porting optical interconnect technology into future product development plans. In this paper, we will present different achievements of our optical interconnect technology, e.g.: - 10 Gb/s per channel over 1 m link length, - optical link propagation loss below 0.05 dB/cm at 850 nm, - linear link densities up to 16 channels/mm, - feasibility of 2D channel arrays (e.g. 4 times 12), - a fully passive, low-cost alignment concept with a position accuracy of les 5 mum, enabling coupling losses < 0.5 dB, and - electro-optical transmitter and receiver modules operating at 10 Gb/s per channel. Finally, we will report on the successful realization of a 12 times 10 Gb/s card-to-card optical link demonstrator.