Optical interconnects using short optical pulses

We demonstrate the use of a modulator-driven chip-to-chip optical interconnect using short optical pulses to remove jitter and skew. When employing a short (sub-picosecond) pulse laser for optical interconnection, we can use two different aspects of the laser output to our advantage. First, the short pulse duration allows us to sample the data on the output modulators instantaneously, enabling the removal of jitter in output data streams and the removal of inter-channel skew at the modulators. Second, the low jitter output from the laser provides a low jitter signal for clock distribution and, provided the data are also transmitted optically, enables easy synchronization between clock and data