Light waveguide electro-optical printed circuit board

Abstract

The configuration of polymer light waveguide electro-optical printed circuit board(EOPCB) is proposed in this paper. An additional optical layer with light waveguide structure is used in conventional PCB to construct EOPCB. Light waveguide core layer mould is made with SU-8 photolithograph. Polymer light waveguide layer which is embedded between multiplayer PCB is made in experiment by Doctor-blading technology for large size application. Vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) array is used as optical transmitter array. PIN photodiode array is used as optical receiver array. A MT-compatible direct coupling method is presented to couple light beam between optical transmitter/receiver with light waveguide layer. The optical signals from a processor element chip on the PCB can transmit to another processor element chip on the same PCB board through light waveguide interconnection in EOPCB. So optical interconnection between chip to chip for parallel multiprocessor system can be reailzed by EOPCB.

Design and fabrication of waveguide-based chip-to-chip optical interconnection network on printed circuit boards

“…The architecture of interchip optical interconnects on PCB [4] includes a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array, a PIN photodiode array, and a polymeric channel waveguide array functioning as a physical layer of optical interconnects (as shown in Fig. 1).…”