Electrical Interconnect Design Optimization for Fully Embedded Board-level Optical Interconnects

Optical interconnect on printed circuit board are promising for backplane and motherboard applications due to their low propagation loss and high data-transfer density as an alternative to electrical interconnections which fail to meet the increasing data rate equipment. The advantages of embedded polymer waveguide as optical interconnects is the potential compatibility with the current PCB manufacturing process facilitating a smooth technological transfer from electrical to optical interconnects on PCB. In this manuscript, we report on the electrical design, design constraints, layout optimization and challenges in realizing a polymer waveguide embedded in a multi layer printed circuit board (PCB) for high speed applications.