Paper 13369-101
3D photonic integrated interposer enabling connectivity between multicore fibers and photonic integrated circuits
On demand | Presenting live 29 January 2025
Abstract
The increasing bandwidth demands in data centers require optical transceivers that can provide aggregated capacities of 1.6 Tb/s and beyond. In Spatial-Division-Multiplexing (SDM) for optical transceivers, Multicore Fibers (MCF) enable the transport of different spatially separated channels on a shallow footprint. MCF cores are usually arranged in multiple layers, which poses a challenge for interfacing with conventional photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with only one waveguide propagation layer. To address this challenge, a novel 3D photonic integrated interposer structure is proposed in this work for coupling the different layers of MCF cores with arrays of conventional 2D Electro-absorption Modulated Lasers (EML) and photodetectors (PD). The interposer, developed on Fraunhofer HHI's polymer-based hybrid integration platform, contains 1x1 3D multimode interference (MMI) couplers. These novel 3D MMIs can interconnect a vertical pitch of 22.5 μm to match the large vertical distance of the MCF cores. MMI losses of 3 dB (best case) were measured for the fabricated MMIs at a wavelength of 1310 nm. This enables the connection of five MCFs with eight cores each in an array to two arrays of four EMLs and two arrays of four PDs. We will discuss the design, and characterization of this 3D photonic integrated interposer in more detail.
Presenter
Fraunhofer-Institut für Nachrichtentechnik, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI (Germany)
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