Optical interconnection on PCB level using MT compatible connectors and fiber-embedded boards

Optical interconnection between LSIC (Large Scale integrated circuit) is an increasing demand as data communication is growing very fast, whereas electronic interconnection could hardly satisfy the fast-growing request of data rate. A realization of on-board optical connection is described in this paper, of which multimode fibers were buried into the RF4 board by cutting grooves on the surface of the board with a LPKF ProtoMat95sll, and two MT connectors were reconstructed to form an input-and-output couple in the board. Optical transmission at 2.5 Gbit/s×12 channels data rate was demonstrated and a widely opening eye pattern was achieved. Large scale prototype of dense-multimode-fiber-embedded board for the backplane application was also fabricated by using the methods mentioned in this paper.