Polymer optical waveguide for optical-electrical printed circuit board

The drastic growth in internet services has led to growth in data sharing between the users. This has led to need for powerful and large data centers, where huge number of storage and computing servers are interconnected. According to the reports, annual data center traffic is growing at a very high growth rate of 25%, of which the major contribution is due to the servers within the data centers, i.e. Intra datacenters. The traffic outside the data center is handled by high-speed optical fiber network. However, within the datacenter the data is handled by both optical and electrical interconnects. It is essential that the fully network infrastructure is made optical to cater to the future needs. To fulfill the intra- and inter-system bandwidth requirements of data centers and HPC (high-performance computers). Though the server racks are connected through active optical cables, the server boards are still fully electrical, i.e. the optical-electrical conversion is done at the board edge. This conversion leads to bandwidth limitations at the server board. In this work we proposed to extend the optical reach to the processing unit i.e., microprocessors and memory unit from board edge. This is achieved by designing an OEPCB (Optical-Electrical Printed Circuit Board) using laser direct writing and to define high-speed optical waveguide. In this work, we target to demonstrate an on-board waveguide technology that can support data rate of 10 Gbps/channel. The demonstrator will enable a platform for further improvement in integration that will enable the next generation High-speed connection in Datacenters.