Glass carrier based packaging approach demonstrated on a parallel optoelectronic transceiver module for PCB assembling

Glass as a carrier material for electrical and optical interconnects has many benefits compared to conventional materials like silicon, ceramic or polymer based laminates because of its excellent dielectric and transparent properties that are becoming important for electrical high-frequency signal wiring as well as for optical wave guiding. Furthermore, the integration potential of glass is excellent because of the dimensional stability under thermal load and the coefficient of thermal expansion matching that of silicon ICs. A small pitch size of conductor traces, small scale through-vias and high alignment accuracy are the key requirements that will be achieved from glass carrier based packaging. Another outstanding benefit is the transparency of glass that allows the planar integration of optical waveguides inside the glass core material and the light transmission through the carrier between different optical layers. This paper presents a four channel bi-directional optoelectronic transceiver module that was designed and processed using the glass carrier based packaging approach called glassPack. The transceiver operates with 10 Gbps per channel and has an extremely low power consumption of 592 mW. The module is mounted on a printed circuit test board and the performance is characterized by bit error rate testing.