Optical interconnects play an important role in enabling high-speed short-reach communication links within nextgeneration high-performance electronic systems. Multimode polymer waveguides in particular allow the formation of high-capacity optical backplanes and cost-effective board-level optical interconnects. Their formation on flexible substrates offers significant practical advantages and enables their deployment in environments where shape and weight conformity become particularly important, such as in cars and aircraft. However, bending and twisting of flexible multimode waveguides can have a significant effect on their optical transmission performance due to mode loss and mode coupling. Moreover, the magnitude of the induced effects strongly depends on the launch conditions employed. In this paper, therefore, we present detailed loss, crosstalk, and bandwidth studies on flexible multimode waveguide arrays for different launch conditions regarding their use in real-world systems. The minimum radius to achieve a 1 dB excess bending loss is obtained for each launch condition as well as the crosstalk degradation due to bending. It is shown that for a 50 µm MMF input, a 6 mm bending radius is required for excess losses below 1 dB, while crosstalk below −35 dB is obtained in adjacent waveguides even under strong bending. Moreover, it is found that twisting has a small effect on the loss and crosstalk performance of the samples. Excess twisting loss less than 0.1 dB and crosstalk of −40 dB are obtained for three full 360°turns under a 50 µm MMF launch. Finally, the bandwidth studies carried out on the samples indicate than no significant bandwidth degradation is induced due to sample bending, with bandwidth-length product values larger than 150 GHz × m obtained for restricted launches. The set of results presented herein specify the deployment of this flexible polymer multimode waveguide technology in real-world systems and demonstrate its strong potential to implement low-loss highbandwidth optical interconnects.

Polymer multimode waveguides on flexible substrates enable the formation of bendable low-cost optical interconnects that can be deployed in a wide range of applications. However, the highly-multimoded nature of such guides in combination with the stress and mode mixing induced due to sample bending raise important concerns about the effect that sample flexure has on their bandwidth performance and potential to support high-speed data transmission. In this work therefore, we present data transmission studies on a 1 m long flexible spiral waveguide when flexure is applied. The flexible polymer sample is bent 180° around a cylindrical mandrel and the loss and frequency response of the waveguide are obtained for radii of curvature down to 4 mm and are compared with the performance obtained when no flexure is applied. The BER performance of the respective optical link is also recorded at data rates up to 40 Gb/s. A flat frequency response up to at least 30 GHz is demonstrated for all bending radii applied and error-free (BER<10 -12 ) data transmission is achieved for all data rates studied up to 40 Gb/s. The results clearly demonstrate that sample flexing does not result in any significant transmission impairments in such links and highlight the strong potential of this technology for use in high-speed board-level interconnections.

Abstract──In this paper, we have proposed two new 1-D code families for spectral amplitude coding optical code-division multiple-access (SAC-OCDMA) systems. They are referred to as (i) partitioned diagonal code (PDC) and (ii) partitioned modified quadratic congruence code (PMQCC). Simulation results show that both of codes can reduce phase-induced intensity noise (PIIN) and support more active users as compared with MQC. Our results show that for similar code length PDC and PMQCC can support 11% and 14%, respectively, more simultaneous users as compared with MQC. Also at each synchronous time, the auto-correlations of PDC and PMQCC reach to their peak values and their cross-correlations remain one. Index Terms-Spectral amplitude coding (SAC), optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA), phase-induced intensity noise (PIIN), partitioned diagonal code (PDC), partitioned MQC code (PMQCC).

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