In interconnections between bookshelf-assembled asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch boards, a large number of micro-optical signal beams can be optically interconnected by a beam direction compensating system using a vertical cavity surface emitting laser, an x-y beam positioning sensor and a beam deflector made of an adjustable liquid prism. This beam direction compensating system can suppress the decrease in coupling efficiency between transmitters and receivers to no more than 15%, even if boards are inserted and extracted repeatedly, and are shocked repeatedly at a high intensity of 100 G. The compensation is very fast (20 ms). Furthermore, various optical interconnections necessary for ATM switching networks can be achieved by beam deflectors of a liquid crystal microprism array. In this preliminary study, we fabricate no more than eightchannel optical interconnections. However, since one surface emitting laser diode can have many channels in a small area (64 channels per 4 mm 2 ) and the aperture of this adjustable liquid prism is wide (28 mm in diameter) and uniform, a huge number of optical interconnection channels will be is possible using this system.Index Terms-ATM printed circuit boards, light deflectors, liquid crystal (LC), optical interconnections, switching systems.
We propose free-space optical interconnections for a bookshelf-assembled terabit-per-second-class ATM switch. Thousands of arrayed optical beams, each having a rate of a few gigabits per second, propagate vertically to printed circuit boards, passing through some boards, and are connected to arbitrary transmitters and receivers on boards by polarization controllers and prism arrays. We describe a preliminary experiment using a 1-mm-pitch 2 x 2 beam-collimator array that uses vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser diodes. These optical interconnections can be made quite stable in terms of mechanical shock and temperature fluctuation by the attachment of reinforcing frames to the boards and use of an autoalignment system.
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