OPTOBUS/sup TM/ I: performance of a 4 Gb/s optical interconnect

The Optobus/sup TM/ optical link is a ten channel parallel fiber bidirectional optical interconnect. The design goal was to produce a 'transparent' parallel data link that can be directly substituted for parallel copper regardless of the characteristics of the data stream. Transparency requires certain tradeoffs in the ultimate performance of the link. In the case of Optobus I, these trade-offs result in a nominal 500 ps eye closure of all ten channels combined with a 400 Mb/s data rate.