Optoelectronic array interconnections

Two-dimensional parallel optoelectronic links are proposed for interconnections between electronic boards. Experiments were performed with LED-arrays and laserdiodes as the light transmitter, multimode fibre-arrays and imaging systems for light guiding and a CMOS opto-ASIC as highly sensitive light-receiver (detection limit is 1 fJ bit^–1 at a bit error rate of less than 10^–9). In the experiment each channel has a data rate of 10 Mbits^–1, the system is designed for 128 parallel channels occupying an area of less than 1 cm² and thus providing an overall throughput of more than 1 Gbits^–1. The applications are connections between CPUs and shared memories within a multiprocessor system.