Building a packaging hierarchy for optical interconnects using polymer waveguides: Exploring the options

Abstract

Electronic packaging is based on a hierarchy of structures and components that are the building blocks for designing and building interconnects to support semiconductor devices for computing, communication, and consumer products. These electronic packaging building blocks are readily available as industry standard components for which manufacturability, reliability and cost are well established. To date, a similar hierarchy of building blocks for optical interconnects exists only for the optical fiber cabling used for longer distance signal transmission applications and not for short range, multichannel input/output (I/O) traces such as inside a computer or switch/router. As frequency and bandwidth requirements in information processing increases, it is widely expected that the performance limitations and the increasing power requirements of electronic data transmissions within the confines of information handling systems will provide an opportunity for optical interconnects to begin to supplant copper wiring. In order for optical interconnects to become a real option, however, reliable and affordable electro-optical packaging components must become available. Some of the structural options for such components are the topic of discussion of this paper.