Transmission characteristics of waveguide-embedded optical backplane system

The performance of data and telecommunication equipment must keep up with the increasing network speed. Optical interconnection technology is a promising alternative for high throughput systems. The Optical backplane system was demonstrated with waveguide-embedded optical backplane, transmitter board and receiver board. The transmitter and receiver module were prepared for optical PCB, which consists of the metal optical bench, the driver chips, VCSELs, photodiodes and a tapered polymeric waveguide. And parallel optical transmitter and a receiver module were attached onto the processing boards for the interconnection with optical backplane board. The tapered polymeric waveguides are fabricated using the hot embossing technique. And the propagation loss of the waveguide was approximately 0.1dB/cm at 850nm. The waveguide-embedded optical backplane boards were fabricated by using conventional PCB lamination process. The data transmission characteristics of the processing board have been investigated. In our optical backplane system, we demonstrated up to 10Gb/s 27-1 PRBS NRZ data transmission from the transmitter board to the receiver board through optical backplane. The BERs were less than 10-12 under 8Gb/s data rate, which is sufficient level for telecommunications.