Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers and smart pixels for optical interconnection systems

Though TDM (and recently WDM) are generally adopted to increase the total throughput in optical communication systems, SDM must be more effective in most optical interconnection systems. This is because SDM has more advantage in cost and power consumption than TDM, when the transmission distance is rather short, i.e. less than a few hundred meters. VCSEL and smart pixel arrays are very important for constructing optical interconnection systems because they can emit, switch and process a number of broadband optical signals simultaneously. This paper reviews VCSELs and VCSEL-based smart pixels, and discusses the issues for their application to optical interconnections. VCSELs and smart pixels are applicable to three types of parallel optical interconnections: 1) parallel optical fiber link-the optical signals from the SEL array are transmitted through a fiber ribbon for distances less than a few hundred meters; 2) free-space optical interconnects-high-density optical signals from a two-dimensional SEL array are distributed into several ports for distance shorter than one meter; 3) reconfigurable optical interconnects nterconnect patterns among processors are changed dynamically by means of free-space photonic switching networks.