Polymer optical interconnect technology (POINT): optoelectronic packaging and interconnect for board and backplane applications

The Polymer Optical Interconnect Technology (POINT) represents a major collaborative effort among GE, Honeywell, AMP, AlliedSignal, Columbia University and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), sponsored by ARPA, in developing affordable optoelectronic module packaging and interconnect technologies for board- and backplane- level optical interconnect applications for a wide range of military and commercial applications. The POINT program takes a novel development approach by fully leveraging the existing electronic design, processing, fabrication and module packaging technologies to optoelectronic module packaging. The POINT program further incorporates several state-of-the-art optoelectronic technologies that include high-speed VCSEL for multichannel array data TM transmission; flexible optical polymers such as Polyguide or coupling of device-to-fiber using a passively alignment process; a low-loss polymer for backplane interconnect to provide a high I/O density; low-cost diffractive optical elements (DOE) for board-to-backplane interconnect; and use of molded MT array ferrule to reduce overall system size, weight, and cost. In addition to further reducing design and fabrication cycle times, computer simulation tools for optical waveguide and mechanical modeling will be advanced under the POINT program.