SILICON WAFERBOARD-BASED SINGLE-MODE OPTICAL-FIBER INTERCONNECTS

In an extension of previous work, hybrid integration utilizing silicon waferboard platforms has been shown to be useful in building complete single-mode, optical fiber interconnect links, The fabrication and te sting of high-performance optical interconnect array transmitter modul es and receiver modules is described in this paper, The silicon waferb oards include alignment features for passively aligning laser arrays a nd turning mirrors for backside illumination of metal-semiconductor-me tal (MSM) detectors, Transmission rates of 1.4 Gb/s per fiber over sin gle-mode optical fiber have been demonstrated, The four-channel link d eveloped in this work was tested over a distance of 1 km and exhibited a link margin of greater than 11 dB, The bit error ratio was less tha n 10(-12) and the crosstalk for adjacent channel traffic was about -20 dB at 1 GHz. This effort has confirmed the feasibility of employing s ilicon waferboard passive optical alignment techniques to potentially lower the cost of high speed optical interconnects.