The Parallel Optical Link Organization (POLO) is an industry consortium of Hewlett-Packard, Du Pont, AMP, University of Southern California, and SDL, supported by ARPA and will operate between August 1994 and August 1997. The POLO Consortium was formed to leverage the individual strengths of its members to develop low-cost, high-performance optical interconnect modules for applications in workstation clusters, high-speed switching systems, and multimedia. The goal of the program is to demonstrate the manufacturability of affordable optoelectronic transceiver modules and to provide application platforms that show a clear advantage over copper-wire interconnections. The technical objective of the program is to provide a 10 - 20 Gb/s parallel channel optical interconnect module with a projected manufacturing cost of about $10 per channel. In addition, the POLO Consortium provides a complete solution to the end user, including a programmable host interface module and software interface. The POLO Consortium has formed a User Group consisting of seven world-leading computer, telecommunication, and optoelectronic subsystem manufacturers. Regular meetings with the User Group are planned and at the first meeting, a full set of POLO Module specifications have been discussed and generated. The POLO Consortium will provide the User Group members with hardware for evaluation and feedback.

Date Published: 5 April 1995
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 2400, Optoelectronic Interconnects III, (5 April 1995); doi: 10.1117/12.206311

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2400:
Optoelectronic Interconnects III
Ray T. Chen; Harvard Scott Hinton, Editor(s)