Cost-effective 10 Gb/s polymer-based chip-to-chip optical interconnect

Abstract

Board-level optical links are an attractive alternative to their electrical counterparts as they provide higher bandwidth and lower power consumption at high data rates. However, on-board optical technology has to be cost-effective to be commercially deployed. This study presents a chip-to-chip optical interconnect formed on an optoelectronic printed circuit board that uses a simple optical coupling scheme, cost-effective materials and is compatible with well-established manufacturing processes common to the electronics industry. Details of the link architecture, modelling studies of the link's frequency response, characterisation of optical coupling efficiencies and dynamic performance studies of this proof-of-concept chip-to-chip optical interconnect are reported. The fully assembled link exhibits a −3 dBe bandwidth of 9 GHz and −3 dBo tolerances to transverse component misalignments of ±25 and ±37 µm at the input and output waveguide interfaces, respectively. The link has a total insertion loss of 6 dBo and achieves error-free transmission at a 10 Gb/s data rate with a power margin of 11.6 dBo for a bit-error-rate of 10−12. The proposed architecture demonstrates an integration approach for high-speed board-level chip-to-chip optical links that emphasises component simplicity and manufacturability crucial to the migration of such technology into real-world commercial systems.