Experimental demonstration of high-speed free-space reconfigurable card-to-card optical interconnects

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a high-speed free-space reconfigurable card-to-card optical interconnect architecture employing MEMS-based steering mirror arrays for simple and efficient link selection. A printed-circuit-board (PCB) based interconnect module is developed and 3 × 10 Gb/s reconfigurable card-to-card optical interconnect with a bit-error-rate (BER) of ~10(-6) for up to 30 cm is realized using a 250 μm pitch-size micro-lens array. In addition, due to the usage of MEMS steering-mirrors, larger lenses can be employed at the receiver side for collecting stronger optical signal power to increase the achievable interconnect range or to improve the BER performance. Experimental results show that with 1-mm diameter lenses the interconnect distance can exceed 80 cm.