DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, AND CHARACTERIZATION OF AN OPTICAL POWER-SUPPLY SPOT-ARRAY GENERATOR FOR A 4-STAGE FREE-SPACE OPTICAL BACKPLANE

The design and implementation of a robust, scalable, and modular optic al power supply spot-array generator for a modulator-based free-space optical backplane demonstrator is presented. Four arrays of 8 x 4 spot s with 6.47-mu m radii (at 1/e(2) points) pitched at 125 mu m in the v ertical direction and 250 mu m in the horizontal were required to prov ide the light for the optical interconnect. Tight system tolerances de manded careful optical design, robust, optomechanics, and effective al ignment techniques. Issues such as spot-array generation, polarization , power efficiency, and power uniformity are discussed. Characterizati on results are presented. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.