Progress towards low-cost silicon waferboard optical interconnects

As data rates increase and cost and size requirements for systems decline, improvements are needed in costly, bulky, and interference prone electronic interconnects. Optical fiber based interconnects offer solutions to these problems and may often be used rather universally without requiring substantial reengineering. We have explored a hybrid integration approach as a technique for providing low cost optical interconnect transmitters and receivers using passively aligned arrays of lasers and actively aligned MSM photodetectors on silicon waferboard.