Short Courses

SC239 Short-Reach Optical Interconnects

Sunday, February 24, 1:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Brian E. Lemoff; Scientific Res. Group, West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation, USA

Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)

Course Description
Optical interconnect technology is already the preferred choice for any wired" high-speed communication channel covering distances beyond 100 meters. The preference for optical interconnects over purely electrical, copper-based interconnects increases as bandwidth requirements increase. As data rates continue to increase, the link distances for which optics becomes the preferred technology are decreasing. Optical interconnects are now moving into data-centers for very-high-bandwidth box-to-box applications over distances as short as 10 meters, and if the trends continue in the computing industry, optical interconnects may soon find application in the backplanes that interconnect boards within multiprocessor computer systems. This course will present an overview of short-reach optical interconnect technology, from traditional LED-based Ethernet transceivers all the way to high-density multichannel solutions now being investigated for multi-Terabit/s optical backplanes. Material will include applications and standards, basic component technologies (e.g. optoelectronics, IC's, optics, packaging, connectors), the basics of optical link analysis (e.g. power budgets, eye-diagrams, link penalties), and a survey of high-bandwidth, short-reach optical interconnect solutions including serial, parallel optics and coarse WDM.

Benefits and Learning Objectives
This course should enable you to:

• Determine the suitability of optical interconnects for system applications.
• Compare technology options for short-reach optical interconnects.
• Design a basic optical link.
• Identify the components best suited for a given optical interconnect application.
• Explain short-reach optical interconnect technology to system engineers and management.
• Compute a simple optical power budget.

Intended Audience
This introductory course is intended for an audience with at least some technical background in engineering, physics or related disciplines, and is ideally suited for engineers from related fields in optics, electronics, networking or computing systems who want to learn more about short-reach optical interconnects. Marketing or business development professionals seeking a deeper understanding of the technology may also consider taking this course.

Instructor Biography
Brian E. Lemoff is currently with the West Virginia High-Technology Consortium Foundation (WVHTCF), where he is the director of physical sciences and technology. Prior to joining WVHTCF in fall of 2005, he worked for Agilent Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., where he managed a research group developing advanced technologies for ultra-compact, ultra-low-cost optical interconnects. Lemoff has been working in the area of low-cost high-density optical interconnects, including coarse WDM and parallel optics, since joining Agilent Labs (formerly HP Labs) in 1994. His pioneering work in coarse WDM for the LAN has been extensively published, and he played a key role in successfully gaining acceptance for coarse WDM in the IEEE 10-Gigabit Ethernet standard. Lemoff received his doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 1994. For his doctoral work in the area of ultra-short pulses and X-ray lasers, he was awarded the 1995 American Physical Society award for outstanding doctoral research in atomic, molecular and optical physics. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Caltech in 1989.