Demonstration of fiber-based board-level optical clock distributions

Embedding of end-tapered, thin-cladding fiber bundles for board-level large bandwidth optical clock distributions is proposed and demonstrated. Fan-outs of up to 128-nodes on a printed circuit board of area as large as 13/spl times/19 cm/sup 2/ are experimentally demonstrated. Both silica and polymer fibers were tested. Performance parameters, such as fiber bending loss, attenuations, dispersions, coupling loss and uniformity were measured. Embedding of fibers on a double-layered chip-populated real PCB was performed.