1.3- m Four-Channel 10-Gb/s Parallel Optical Transceiver With Polymer PLC Platforms for Very-Short-Reach Applications

A four-channel times10-Gb/s parallel optical transceiver for high-capacity very-short-reach applications was developed. The transceiver module was fabricated with low-cost components such as polymer planar lightwave circuit (PLC) platforms and 1.3-mum Fabry-Perot laser diodes (FPLDs). The polymer PLC platform enables the FPLDs or waveguide photodiodes (WGPDs) to be butt-coupled to the polymer waveguide by low-cost passive alignment. Using 1.3-mum FPLDs and single-mode fibers (SMFs) achieves reliable transmission over 600 m. Widening the spacing between the waveguides up to 1 mm suppressed the interchannel crosstalk to below -39 dB. The fabricated transceiver was operated at 10 Gb/s per channel and it successfully demonstrated 600-m error-free transmission. The sensitivity of each channel was better than -14 dBm with an interchannel-crosstalk penalty of less than 0.7 dB