A LOW-COST HIGH-PERFORMANCE OPTICAL INTERCONNECT

The Optobus(TM) link is a ten channel parallel bidirectional data link based on multimode fiber ribbons, The guiding principal of the Optobu s design was to produce an optical interconnect capable of competing w ith copper on price, not just performance, Recognizing that packaging dominates the cost of optical interconnects, the design focused on min imizing the complexity of the optical subassembly. A key component of this strategy is the use of AlGaAs/GaAs vertical cavity surface emitti ng lasers (VCSEL's), Another is designing the silicon receiver and tra nsmitter arrays around the module level packaging parasitics, The resu lting parallel transceiver modules achieve a minimum throughput of 1.5 Gb/s in each direction with a power dissipation of 1.6 W.