Intra-rack optical interconnection links

In the next years, when the data throughput in the telecom equipment will increase, the electrical interconnections among the boards in a subrack will be a bottleneck for the signal transmission. For transmitting digital data at several tents of Gbps, it will be needed to pass to a transmission layer completely optical, where optical boards will be interconnected in the same subrack by means of optical backplanes. Actually the optical backplane design and manufacturing involves very sophisticated and expensive technologies. In this paper an example of low cost solution for optically interconnecting different boards in the same subrack is presented, highlighting the benefit from the data transmission point of view.