<title>General purpose bidirectional optical backplane bus</title>

Abstract

We report for the first time a bi-directional optical backplane bus for a high performance system containing nine multi-chip module (MCM) boards. The backplane bus reported herein employs arrays of multiplexed polymer-based waveguide holograms in conjunction with a waveguiding plate within which 16 substrate guided waves for 72 (8 X 9) cascaded fanouts are generated. Data transfer of 1.2 Gbit/sec at 1.3 micrometers wavelength is demonstrated for a single bus line with 72 cascaded fanouts. Packaging-related issues such as transceiver size and misalignment are embarked upon to provide a reliable system with a wide bandwidth coverage. The backplane bus demonstrated is for general-purpose and, therefore, compatible with such IEEE standardized buses as VMEbus, Futurebus, and FASTBUS, and can function as a backplane bus in existing computing environments and significantly reduce the bottlenecks that accompany electrical interconnects.