A novel lens system for high speed Light Peak optical link

A novel and compact FOCI lens system based on Light Peak technology was designed which is currently employed in our USB 3.0 active optical cable (AOC) optical engine designed for data transmission at 5.0Gbps. Simulations of light coupling were conducted to understand the coupling efficiency (CE) with respect to the misalignment of VCSEL alone and also the total misalignment after mechanical coupling based on 62.5μm and 80 μm core multimode fibers and compared with Light Peak lens design. It is concluded that FOCI lens system is less sensitive to both misalignments compared to Light Peak solution for CE above 75%. The FOCI lens system which includes the prism receptacle and plug ferrule were bonded and assembled respectively on FOCI USB 3.0 AOC optical engine and tested. The eye diagrams and BERT tests confirmed that 100m FOCI USB 3.0 AOC performance is compliant with SuperSpeed USB specifications. The FOCI lens system can also be applied to other AOC types such as 10G SFP+AOC and 40G QSFP+AOC.