Optical interconnect based on a fibre bus

Abstract

A technology which may form a powerful optical interconnection scheme based on a bus architecture is presented. It is shown that the fibre array connectors involved require alignment tolerances comparable to those of present electrical connectors. Further system flexibility can be obtained by tailoring the connector wavelength characteristics. Results of an experiment, where distributed amplification within the backplane of an optical bus was used to compensate for the power removed at the access points, are also presented. This allows a significantly higher number of output ports to be served than would be possible using a passive bus. As an example application, the feasibility of using the technology as the backplane interconnection in a card and rack system is demonstrated. Extension to a switching scheme using the multi-dimensional optical network concept is described.