Bidirectional single fiber low-cost optoelectronic interconnect for automotive applications

Current trends in vehicular technology reflect an increase in the number of electronic modules, leading to more complicated and expensive wiring. The use of optic fibers offers a low-cost alternative to traditional copper-wir e harnesses, This paper presents a bidirectional, alignment-tolerant optoel ectronic interconnect for automotive applications. The proposed interconnec t offers a low manufacturing potential cost because it uses inexpensive ali gnment tolerant large core plastic fiber for ease of connector alignment. T he optoelectronic interface chip uses time-division multiplexing to combine several information sources into a serial data stream that can be easily d ecoded by a microcontroller, By using a colocated small emitter in the midd le of a large detector, the system achieves both bidirectional communicatio n on a single fiber and alignment tolerant capabilities. Results show that this optoelectronic interconnect is a feasible replacement for wire harness es in automobiles.