POLO - Gigabyteh parallel optical links for multimedia, computer cluster and switching systems

The POLO (Parallel Optical Link Organization) is a collaborative development consortium of Hewlett-Packard, AMP, Du Pont, SDL, and the University of Southern California. The goal of the POLO program is to develop low cost, high performance parallel optical links for applications in central office switching environments, clustered computing, and multimedia. Previous reports have described preliminary results and the general design of the POLO interconnect module [1]. In this paper, we discuss the performance results of the 1st generation POLO module (POLO-1) and progress in the design and assembly of the 2nd generation optimized module.