Electrical-Optical Printed Circuit Boards: Technology - Design - Modeling

Abstract

A novel hybrid electrical-optical printed circuit board technology is introduced which is able to meet the high performance requirements of future electronic equipment. On-board data rates exceeding significantly 1 Gbps are enabled where at the same time EMC- and signal integrity problems can be reduced. The technology has a far-reaching compatibility with the existing technologies and processes for designing and manufacturing printed circuit boards, which means that there is no need to substantially modify the electrical part. This compatibility is a very important pre-requisite in order to enable reasonable costs and to allow a successful introduction of this technology to next generation products.

In the first part of the paper the basic technologies for manufacturing electrical-optical printed circuit boards are addressed. A hot embossing process enabling a high precision manufacturing of optical multimode waveguides within so-called optical layers is introduced and the manufacturing process of entire boards through the integration of these optical layers is described. Moreover, the active and passive components necessary for coupling the optical power into and out of the optical multimode waveguides are described. In the second part the focus is on the necessary extension of the printed circuit board design process. Especially the required modeling and simulation strategies and approaches, respectively, are addressed which are necessary to perform timing and signal integrity analysis of optical onboard interconnects. This kind of analysis is necessary for providing timing and signal integrity information in order to support the design process, especially the continuous and post-layout validation of the design data, respectively.