Demonstration of high-speed transmission through waveguide-embedded optical backplane

The system performance of data- and telecommunication equipment must keep up with the increasing network speed. Optical interconnections technology is a promising alternative for high-throughput systems. We demonstrate the optical backplane system using a waveguide-embedded optical backplane and two processing boards. The transmitter and receiver modules were prepared for optical printed circuit boards (PCBs), which consists of the metal optical bench, the driver chips, vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), photodiodes, and a tapered polymeric waveguide. We report high-speed transmission of 2⁷-1 pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) nonreturn to zero (NRZ) data up to 10 Gbits/s through the optical backplane system. The results demonstrate that the optical backplane system can be practical and valuable for the future high-throughput systems by using metal optical bench and precisely machined optical plug-adaptor structure to achieve stable board-to-board interconnection.