A practical optical printed circuit board (PCB) was demonstrated, using a waveguide-embedded optical backplane and processing boards. The polymeric waveguide was produced by means of a hot embossing technique then embedded following a conventional lamination processes. The core size of waveguide was 100 x 60 μm² (input section), 60 x 60 μm² (output section), and the propagation loss of tapered polymeric waveguide was approximately 0.1 dB/cm at 850 nm. We prepared a optical backplane with polymeric waveguide by using conventional multilayer board lamination processes. The transmission power and dimension of the optical backplane was same as those of waveguide before lamination. A metal optical bench was used as a packaging die for the optical devices and the integrated circuit chips in both the transmitter and the receiver processing boards. We used a 1×4 850 nm VCSEL array with 2 dBm of output power for the transmitter and a PIN photodiode array for the receiver. We successfully demonstrated 8 Gb/s of data transmission between the transmitter processing board and the optical backplane board.

Date Published: 14 October 2004
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5523, Current Developments in Lens Design and Optical Engineering V, (14 October 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.558639

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5523:
Current Developments in Lens Design and Optical Engineering V
Pantazis Z. Mouroulis; Warren J. Smith; R. Barry Johnson, Editor(s)