News

2010-02-08 | C-LAB demonstrates the pluggable optical „board-to-board“ connection

At this year’s IEEE Photonics Winter Topicals Conference in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, Siemens AG, SIS C-LAB demonstrated the concept of a pluggable optical interconnection technique for optical “board-to-board” connections in cooperation with vario-optics ag and Tyco Electronics Ltd.

Therefore an optical 12 channels transmission system demonstrator was built of 12 parallel polymer waveguides being planar integrated into the circuit boards. The total length of the waveguide system is 48 cm, the total width is smaller than 3 mm. The demonstrator runs with 3.2 Gbps/channel and transfers the 12 signals along three optically connected boards in a card-backplane-card like structure. The cards can be plugged while the demonstrator is running. Additionally each card has a plug connection for fibers or an electro-optical converter module. The concept can be scaled up to support data rates above 10 Gbps/channel.


The eye patterns show very good transmission characteristics having 3.2 Gbps/channel each. The system is scalable for data rates higher than 10 Gbps/channel


One main characteristic of this new technique are flexible optical waveguides (so-called FlexTails) coming seamlessly out of the board. They are used to couple signals into or out of the planar board-integrated waveguides. No mirrors or lenses are used. The self-adjusting pluggable optical connections are reached by terminating the FlexTails with modified MT-ferrules. The presented proof-of-concept showed the pluggable board-to-board connection as well as a fiber-to-board and a module-to-board solution using this technique. The pluggable connections are compatible with the MT connector standard.


Optical board-to-board connections with self-adjusting MT like couplers


The optical interconnection system has been fully analyzed and designed by using C-LAB´s powerful optical multimode waveguide simulation and design environment “OptoBoard Designer”.


Simulation and design environment “OptoBoardDesigner”


The circuit board based optical interconnection technique is supposed to be the technology of the future. In contrast to the conventional electrical connection technique its bandwidth and bandwidth density are scalable regarding the continuously rising requirements on data transfer in computer systems. Moreover, the optical transmission technique is not just less susceptible to interference, but even more energy efficient at higher data rates then usual copper connections.

Please download the presentation, the paper and a short film here.