A Massively Parallel Optical Data Interconnect

50941-98-I A Massively Parallel Optical Data Interconnect--Gemfire Corporation, 2471 East Bayshore Road, Suite 600, Palo Alto, CA 94303-3206; (650) 849-6887 Dr. D. Ken Wagner, Principal Investigator Dr. James H. Stanley, Business Official DOE Grant No. DE-FG03-98ER82586 Amount: $75,000 As the number of nodes in a distributed computing environment increases, the cost and efficiency of the data interconnects begin to dominate the system design. Affordable data links are needed that can transfer large amounts of information at high-speed (~1 Terabit/sec) over distances up to several hundred meters. A prototypical interconnect comprises a transmitter, a carrier, and a receiver. This project will develop an interconnect comprising a two-dimensional array of diode lasers (the transmitter), a multilayer stack of polymer waveguides (the carrier), and a two-dimensionalphotodiode sensors (the receiver). With such an approach, thousands of independent fiberoptic channels of data can be carried over a cable measuring less than 0.3 cm2, resulting in an inexpensive, flexible interconnect. In Phase I, feasibility will be established by designing and demonstrating: (1) the dimensional stability of a multi-layer stack of polymer waveguides; and (2) an alignment tolerant scheme for coupling a two-dimensional array of diode lasers to matching arrays of polymer waveguides. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: The proposed massively parallel interconnect promises to lower the price/performance ratio of current optical data interconnects by orders of magnitude. Applications for such interconnects include large distributed computing environments, clustered parallel computing systems, and datacom switching._