Abstract

It has been shown that passive waveguides based on silicon nitride¹ or polyimide² are suitable for very short distance interconnections, such as the interconnections between chips on a multi-chip module, a printed-circuit-board, or a backplane interconnections in a digital system. Although suffering more loss than fiber, passive waveguides have the potential of providing much closer spacing and planar crossover geometries, as well as integration of modulators, optical amplifiers, and receivers on the same substrate. The density of a waveguide array is mainly limited by the coupling induced crosstalk between adjacent waveguides. Waveguide coupling effects have been intensively studied^3,4 but have not been related to the system requirements. In this paper, a crosstalk model is developed and used to analyze the system requirements for a passive waveguide array environment.

© 1991 Optical Society of America