This work presents the design details and experimental results for a parallel optical link. The link is designed for connections within high-speed digital systems, specifically for board- and backplane-level interconnections. The link can contain as many fibers in parallel as technology permits. The unusual aspects of this interconnection system are that it is DC-coupled and uses fully differential inputs, two optical channels per signal, to achieve self-thresholding and noise immunity. A chip set consisting of a 2.5-Gb/s bipolar differential laser driver, a 800-Mb/s GaAs MSM (metal-semiconductor-metal) preamplifier array, a 800-Mb/s GaAs MSM preamplifier-postamplifier array, and a GaAs MSM preamplifier array in which each preamplifier has a different bandwidth varying from 300 Mb/s to 2 Gb/s has been designed, fabricated, and tested to serve as a vehicle for verifying the concept. Although the experimental testing of the entire interconnect system is not yet complete, the experimental studies presented show a bandwidth in excess of 800 MHz and excellent signal isolation between channels.
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