Abstract

The recent intense interest in highly parallel optical interconnects in the United States, Europe, and Japan has been stimulated by the recent trend toward increasing the integration between very-large-scale integrated electronics and optics in order to implement high-bandwidth and high-speed processing/storage density. This is particularly important in highly distributed three-dimensional computer architectures, where massive parallelism is required at the processor level. Conventional electric interconnects can only be of a local nature and can only have low parallelism. In the area of highly distributed three-dimensional architecture, POC has demonstrated the first integration of single-mode, glass integrated optics with multiplexed volume holoplanar (waveguide) gratings¹,² and volume total-internal-reflection holographic couplers (making use of a 1:4:8 optical bus and 1:32 fan-out). In this article, we discuss the hardware aspects of the optical interconnect, which uses multiplexed planar holograms.³ Component issues (laser sources, modulators, switches, interconnects, detectors, waveguides, and couplers) and system issues (power budget, bandwidth, wavelength sensitivity, and reconfigurability) are particularly important.

© 1990 Optical Society of America