Design of a compact alignment tolerant optical interconnect for photonic backplane applications

This paper describes a compact alignment tolerant interconnect designed for use within a prototype modulator based photonic backplane. To simplify the optical design, the optical input and output of each smart pixel array are clustered separately, thereby allowing a Fourier-plane patterned mirror array to be used in the beam-routing optics. The primary advantages of this scheme are the simplicity of the optical design and the alignability associated with clustered window microchannel relay systems making it ideally suited for high density interconnection applications.