Abstract

For intra-rack board-to-board and intra-board interconnections, photonics can enable system topologies no longer feasible with copper. One interesting application of photonics is to realize a high speed multidrop bus. Historically, computer system architectures were dominated by multidrop bus designs. However, signal integrity constraints on high speed electronic buses have forced system designers to abandon conventional bus architectures replacing them with networked point-to-point connections. In this paper, we present the design and construction of a 30cm long, 4 channel optical multidrop bus capable of interconnecting up to 8 receiver modules at 10Gbps per channel.

© 2009 OSA, IEEE Photonics Society, SPIE, COS, CIC