Flexible electronic-optical local bus modules to the board-to-board, board-to-chip, and chip-to-chip optical interconnection

In this paper, a flexible active E/O local bus module using multi-mode optical transmission is proposed to perform board-to-board, chip-to-chip, or board-to-chip optical interconnection with compatibility to traditionally electrical interfaces. In this proposed scheme, high speed modules or chips on tradition printed circuit board (PCB) can be directly interconnected through a flexible active E/O cable which can actively convert high speed signals to/from optical forms and then transmit optical signals through the optical waveguide layer. A 17-cm long prototyping of the proposed E/O local bus module is developed here to demonstrate the feasibility of short reach optical interconnection in board level applications.