Optical Interconnect Technology for High-bandwidth Data Connection in Next-generation Servers

摘要

In the near future, an improvement in the performance and integration of servers (for example blade servers) will cause an increase in the amount of data to be transferred in places where a data connection is required.Furthermore, the data rate of transmission is growing to 25 Gb/s.These will increase the interconnect bandwidth in servers to around the 10 Tb/s order.We propose "optical interconnect" that is a data connection using optical fibers so as to avoid a limitation of bandwidth caused by a degradation of waveform and interference in copper wiring.Optical interconnects can be used to transmit data signal at high speed and they excel in terms of wiring density and transmission distance.To apply such optical interconnects to servers, many optical channels must be integrated in the limited space of a server chassis.To do so requires low-cost and compact optical components.In this paper, we propose optical technology (an optical transceiver module, optical connector and optical mid-plane) that makes it possible to have low-cost and high-density optical interconnects, and we describe a verification of their practical use in trial manufacturing.