VI Systems awarded three US patents for its optical interconnect technology

VI Systems GmbH (VIS) says the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued notices of allowance for three U.S. patent applications to proceed to grant. The patents cover energy-efficient, compact high-speed optical interconnects.

A huge market of optical interconnects is arising in high-performance computing with modern systems already requiring thousands optical links per single rack. The number of optical links per system increases two orders of magnitude every five years, with modern systems absorbing millions of VCSEL and PIN-based optical links, presently at 10–14 Gbps, VIS says. Future optical interconnects will use higher-speed links operating at 50 Gbps.

VIS says the first of the three allowed patents, entitled “opto-electronic assembly for high speed transmission” covers optoelectronic assembly for high-speed signal transmission based on surface-emitting/receiving components, enabling the –3 dB electrical bandwidth in the TO-can package to be increased to 90 GHz. The company says the concept is suitable for single-channel links and can also be extended to multichannel data transmission. It has been applied to VIS’s 850-nm multimode fiber receiver subassemblies operating at 50 Gbps. VIS expects that, in mass production, such a microassembly will not cost more than a few dollars.

The second patent, entitled “optoelectronic interconnect for high frequency data transmission at low power consumption” describes the technical requirements for optical links capable of transmitting optical signals at speeds at and above 20 Gbps with power consumption below 10 mW per Gbps. The interconnect includes optical transmitters and detectors having capacitances below 150 femto-Farads.

The third patent, entitled “method for encoding and decoding of optical signals,” addresses a multilevel coding scheme, where the transmitter is fast, and the receiver is slow such that the response time of the receiver exceeds at least the shortest of the durations of the optical pulses.

VIS offers engineering samples of their fiber-coupled 50-Gbps photodetector module for 850-nm wavelength (part no. R50-850). The company has started shipping test-board sets of its fiber-coupled 4x25-Gbps parallel optical transmitter (VHXT5204A-840) and receiver (VHXR5204A-840).

VI Systems’ CEO Nikolay Ledentsov commented, “This is an important achievement for the company in a time when the optical link technology moves to 26-28 Gbps in 2013 and the standardization work on 56 Gbps per channel is going to be completed by the end of 2014. At these bit data rates a key requirement for the success is the realization of low cost, compact, and energy-efficient integrated optical assemblies, including heat dissipation and cross-talk considerations.”

For more information on optical components and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyers Guide.