Abstract
With the rapidly growing volume of communication traffic, the capacities of routers and servers in data centers have had to increase to an extraordinary extent. As part of this, active optical cables (AOCs) have been employed to realize very-high-speed signal transmission in rack-to-rack applications over several tens of meters, instead of conventional electrical wiring using coaxial cables, and the market for AOCs has been growing rapidly. On the other hand, next generation high-density optical interconnects tend to employ an architecture of mounting parallel optical modules on a PCB. The market for these high-density optical interconnects is expected to grow significantly over the next several years. In order to meet the requirements of mounting architectures in both applications, we have developed parallel-optical modules which can be mounted using a solder-in-reflow process and can also be replaced through an electrical-pluggable interface. Furthermore, we propose 1060-nm VCSEL-based optical interconnects whose benefits include high speed, high reliability, and lower power consumption. We also demonstrate their benefit in optical link performance. The power consumption of an optical link is as low as 6.4 mW/Gbit/s over the operating temperature. In an effort to verify this with actual systems, we solder-mounted 1060-nm 10Gbit/s×12-channel parallel-optical modules and also performed full reliability tests. From these, we confirmed good results in all tests and concluded the optical modules are applicable to actual applications.
