Review of optical interconnect(on board or others) development in Japan

Activity in development of optical interconnection is growing in Japan. In this review recent Japanese activities are outlined from an opto-electronics package point of view. The most advantage in optical interconnection is in optical wiring such as an optical fiber or optical waveguide. The first motive for optical interconnection is realization of high throughput data transmission beyond speed of electrical transmission. The data throughput of a back plane in routers and servers is well over Tbps. This requires data transmission rates exceeding 10 Gbps . At high bit rates problems in electrical connections begins to appear. The most important problems are in design of input/output (I/O) buffers and in the characteristics of electric parts such as a printed wiring board (PWB) and interposer. To overcome the limitation of electrical connection realization of optical interconnection is expected for high speed transmission. Optical interconnection is considered one of the best solutions to realize low power consumption for high data transmission. On the other hand, additional components like optical transceivers and optical connectors are necessary. These components have to be merged in the circuit board without sacrificing board space or the total manufacturing cost.