OPTICAL WAVE-GUIDE CIRCUIT-BOARD WITH A SURFACE-MOUNTED OPTICAL RECEIVER ARRAY

A photonic circuit board is fabricated for potential application to in terchip and interboard parallel optical links. The board comprises pho tolithographically patterned polymer optical waveguides on a conventio nal glass-epoxy electrical circuit board and a surface-mounted integra ted circuit (IC) package that optically and electrically couples to an optoelectronic IC. The waveguide circuits include eight-channel array s of straights, cross-throughs, curves, self-aligning interconnects to multi-fiber ribbon, and out-of-plane turning mirrors. A coherent, fus ed bundle of optical fibers couples light between 45-deg waveguide mir rors and a GaAs receiver array in the IC package. The fiber bundle is easily aligned to the mirrors and the receivers and is amenable to sur face mounting and hermetic sealing. The waveguide-receiver-array board achieved error-free data rates up to 1.25 Gbits/s per channel, and mo dal noise was shown to be negligible.