ACTIVE ALIGNMENT CORRECTION WITH VERTICAL CAVITY SEMICONDUCTOR OPTICAL AMPLIFIER (VCSOA)

In this Phase I SBIR proposal, Ziva proposes to investigate the feasibility of developing an optical connector between a board and a backplane which not only provides optical regeneration but is alignment tolerant, scalable in bandwidth to >40Gbps, operates with very low interchannel crosstalk, provides high connection density as well as having layout flexibility and process and cost compatibility with mainstream electronic manufacturing. Ziva's unique solution is derived from the remarkable properties of Vertical-Cavity Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (VCSOA) to provide amplification gain of >20dB and be able to achieve >40Gbps direct modulation. This low cost optical amplifier device can be fabricated in dense arrays providing low cost high areal density solutions for amplification, while being able to provide self induced optical beam re-alignment to relax board to board optical alignment tolerances. The anticipated results of this effort are to demonstrate the basic concept of the alignment tolerant optical connector with gain in Phase I and develop this concept further into an array connector demo in Phase II.