A low-cost high-performance optical interconnect

The Optobus link is a ten channel parallel bidirectional data link based on multimode fiber ribbons. The guiding principal of the Optobus design was to produce an optical interconnect capable of competing with copper on price, not just performance. Recognizing that packaging dominates the cost of optical interconnects, the design focused on minimizing the complexity of the optical subassembly. A key component of this strategy is the use of AlGaAs/GaAs vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). Another is designing the silicon receiver and transmitter arrays around the module level packaging parasitics. The resulting parallel transceiver modules achieve a minimum throughput of 1.5 Gb/s in each direction with a power dissipation of 1.6 W.