Vibration-Insensitive Reconfigurable Optical Interconnects

The development of very high bandwidth reconfigurable optical interconnects is one of the important goals of present optics research. Direct broadcast interconnect schemes offer the advantage of high data rate free-space optical signals and an inherent immunity to vibration. However, in the past this technique has suffered from poor signal to noise ratio and an inability to reconfigure the network interconnections. Foster-Miller proposes to overcome these prior disadvantages by developing an electrically controlled wavelength-tunable filter which allows each detector to receive one signal with high selectivity and to reconfigure the network by changing receiving wavelengths. This device enables a broadcast interconnect scheme which is simple, low cost, reconfigurable, extendable and immmune to mechanical or vibration problems. For this program we will exploit the unique properties of a new holographic film that can be reliably and repeatedly tuned with an applied voltage at millisecond speeds. The technique involves the combination of liquid crystals in a polymer holographic host. The goal of the Phase I effort will be to demonstrate selective wavelength tuning over a 5 to 10 percent bandwidth with diffraction efficiencies approaching 99 percent. The potential reconfiguration speed of the network ranges between milliseconds and microseconds, while the bandwidth of the data transfer may be in the 100 GB/s range. Commercialization issues will be explored with our partner Polaroid Corporation.