Abstract

Optical interconnections are of interest as a high-speed replacement for electrical interconnections in digital computers^1,2 for applications between mainframes, modules, boards, VLSI circuits,³ and even between points within a VLSI circuit.⁴ The effect of angular and positional alignment on the optical efficiency of tree-space board-to-board optical interconnections is considered here for inexpensive lenses and shown to result in good system performance if reasonable care is taken in the design and assembly of the system. An experimental system was assembled and shown to operate at a rate of 1 Gb/s, a system efficiency of 18.8%, and an estimated aligned optical efficiency of 93%.

© 1989 Optical Society of America