This article presents a promising approach for multi-Tb/s optical interconnects. This approach is contained in the MAUI project, which develops a parallel multiwavelength optical subassembly (PMOSA) that uses PWDM to gain the component-density advantages of two-dimensional parallel optics and the connector and cabling density advantages of CWDM. In the MAUI approach, a standard multimode 12-fiber ribbon is used with 4 wavelengths transmitted through each fiber, for a total of 48 optical channels.

In this letter, we demonstrate error-free operation of a 12-fiber /spl times/4-wavelength /spl times/5.21-Gb/s parallel-wavelength-division-multiplexed (PWDM) optical link. The 250-Gb/s transmitter and receiver assemblies each have a 5/spl times/8-mm footprint and consume a combined power of 1.5 W. To our knowledge, this is the first publication of a fully functional PWDM optical interconnect as well as the highest demonstrated bandwidth per unit area and bandwidth per unit power consumption for any multiple-channel fiber-optic interconnect. This technology is intended for short-distance high-bandwidth-density applications such as multiprocessor computer backplanes.

This paper describes a 500-Gbps parallel wavelength-division multiplexed (PWDM) optical interconnect where 48 channels of 10.42-Gbps data are transmitted over a parallel 12-fiber ribbon with 4 wavelengths per fiber. The transmitter and receiver are each chip-scale packages with a footprint of 5 mm times 8 mm and a combined power consumption of 3 W. This work is motivated by the continually increasing bandwidth needs of short-distance computer processor interconnects, which are demanding optical solutions that maximize bandwidth per unit area, power consumption, and cost

We discuss a 12-fiber × 4-wavelength × 10.4-Gbit/s short-distance parallel-wavelength-division-multiplexed optical interconnect. The 0.5-Tbit/s transmitter and receiver assemblies each have a 5 × 8-mm footprint and together consume 2.95 W.

This work presents the first fully-functional 48-channel parallel-wavelength-division-multiplexed (PWDM) transmitter, receiver and link results at a per-channel data rate of 5.21-Gb/s. This high-density PWDM optical interconnect gives an aggregate link bandwidth of a quarter terabit per second.