Optical Transmission of Polymer Pillars for Chip I/O Optical Interconnections

Abstract

In the pursuit of high-density wafer-level input-output optical interconnections, microscopic polymer pillars have recently been fabricated. The optical performance of these pillars is critical for their potential application to gigascale integration. In the present work, the optical transmission of these pillars is analyzed and measured. It is shown that these polymer pillars act as precision many-moded waveguides, thus, verifying the cross-sectional uniformity, smoothness of surfaces, and optical quality of the material.

Polymer Pillars as Optical I/O for Gigascale Chips using Mirror-Terminated Waveguides

“…The optical transmission characteristics of air-clad polymer pillars have been analyzed in [11] to show that they are good waveguides.…”

Inter-Neuron Communications for Large-Scale Neural Networks using Capacitive Coupling

“…System-on-Chip (SoC) applications take advantage of 3-D interconnects because dissimilar devices can be located on the same stacked chip on different levels [16]. However, heat dissipation from layers in the centre of the 3-D structure is a problem and the area saving and performance diminishes as the number of active layers increases.…”

Matter: Volume 6476

“…Such misalignments could severely reduce the optical power delivered to the PD thereby increasing the bit error rate (BER) and reducing bandwidth [13]. The use of "surface-normal optical waveguides," or polymer pillars, was previously described as a means of addressing the shortcomings of free-space optical I/O interconnections [14][15][16][17]. Figure 1(b) illustrates how the polymer pillars provide optical interconnection between the chip and the substrate.…”