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 testing of high-performance optical interconnect array transmitter modules and receiver modules is described in this paper. The silicon waferboards include alignment features for passively aligning laser arrays and turning mirrors for backside illumination of metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) detectors. Transmission rates of 1.4 Gb/s per fiber over single-mode optical fiber have been demonstrated. The four-channel link developed 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 than 10/sup -12/ and the crosstalk for adjacent channel traffic was about -20 dB at 1 GHz. This effort has confirmed the feasibility of employing silicon waferboard passive optical alignment techniques to potentially lower the cost of high speed optical interconnects.