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First time an electro-optical circuit board (EOCB) is demonstrated with integrated planar glass multimode waveguides and with optical pluggable line card connectors. The waveguides are patterned inside commercially available thin-glass panels by performing a two-step thermal ion-exchange process. The resulting low-loss multimode waveguides possess a gradient-index profile. The glass waveguide panel is embedded within the layer stack-up of a printed circuit board (PCB) using proven industrial processes. Cut-outs inside the PCB are structured for assembling a pluggable optical connector and receptacle system for connecting optical fiber based waveguides on the line cards to integrated optical waveguides in the backplane. The demonstration platform comprises a standardized sub-rack chassis and five pluggable test cards with pluggable optical connectors and designed for housing optical engines. The test cards support a variety of different data interfaces for bidirectional signal integrity measurements. The evaluated demonstrator system performed with bit error free data transmission at 10.3 Gb/s for the tested wavelengths of 850 and 1310 nm

An optical interconnection technology for 1310/1550nm has been successfully developed with single-mode glass waveguide panels characterizes loss of 0.05dB/cm. The glass has been integrated into a multi-layer electrical printed circuit board for silicon photonic assembly

Parallel optical interconnects on-board level requires low propagation loss in wavelength range between 850 and 1550 nm to be compatible with datacom and telecom optical engines. For highest integration density tight waveguide bends and a scalable number of optical layers should be manufacturable for 2D interfaces to optical fiber array connectors and photonic assembly I/O's. We developed a glass waveguide panel process for double-sided processing of commercial available display glass by applying a two-step thermal ion-exchange process for low-loss multi-mode graded-index waveguides. Multiple glass waveguide panels can be embedded between electrical layers. The generic concept enables fabrication of high-density integration (HDI) electro-optical circuit boards (EOCB) with high number of optical and electrical layers. Waveguides with high NA of 0.3 for low bend losses could be achieved in glass with propagation loss of 0.05 dB/cm for all key wavelengths. Four of those glass waveguide panels were embedded in an EOCB demonstrator with size of 280 x 233 mm² providing eight optical layers with 96 channels in an area of 2.8 x 1.5 mm². To the best of our knowledge it's the highest number of layers that has ever been demonstrated for an EOCB.