SC239 Short-Reach Optical Interconnects

Sunday, March 22, 2009
9:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Brian E. Lemoff; West Virginia High-Technology Consortium Foundation, USA
Level: Beginner (no background or minimal training is necessary to understand course material)

Course Description

This course will present an overview of short-reach optical interconnect technology, from traditional LED-based Ethernet transceivers all the way to high-density multichannel solutions now being investigated for multi-Terabit/s optical backplanes. Material will include applications and standards, basic component technologies (e.g. optoelectronics, IC's, optics, packaging, connectors), the basics of optical link analysis (e.g. power budgets, eye-diagrams, link penalties), and a survey of high-bandwidth, short-reach optical interconnect solutions including serial, parallel optics and coarse WDM.

Benefits and Learning Objectives

This course should enable you to:

  • Determine the suitability of optical interconnects for system applications.
  • Compare technology options for short-reach optical interconnects.
  • Compute a simple optical power budget.
  • Identify the components best suited for a given optical interconnect application.
  • Explain short-reach optical interconnect technology to system engineers and management.

Intended Audience

This introductory course is intended for an audience with at least some technical background in engineering, physics or related disciplines, and is ideally suited for engineers from related fields in optics, electronics, networking or computing systems who want to learn more about short-reach optical interconnects. Marketing or business development professionals seeking a deeper understanding of the technology may also consider taking this course.

Biography

Brian E. Lemoff is Director of Physical Sciences and Technology at the West Virginia High-Technology Consortium Foundation (WVHTCF). Before joining WVHTCF in 2005, he led the optical interconnects group at Agilent Labs. Lemoff has been working in the area of short-reach optical interconnects since 1994, and he played a key role in defining the 10-Gigabit Ethernet physical layer. Lemoff received his doctorate from Stanford in 1994. For his doctoral work in the area of ultra-short pulses and X-ray lasers, Lemoff won the 1995 APS award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular or Optical Physics. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Caltech in 1989.