Abstract
Free-space based optical interconnects are promising candidates for
the prevision of parallel, high-speed, densely integrated and reconfigurable
card-to-card interconnectivities in data centers and for high-performance
computing clusters. However, air turbulence due to high temperature of electronic
components and heat dissipation fans typically results in degradation of system
performance through effects such as signal scintillation, beam broadening
and beam wander. In this paper, the impact of air turbulence on our recently
proposed reconfigurable free-space card-to-card optical interconnect scheme
is investigated. Experiments are carried out with lab-emulated moderate and
comparatively strong turbulence and results show that the bit-error-rate (BER)
performance of proposed interconnect scheme is degraded. A power penalty of ~0.5 dB
is observed at BER of 10-9 in emulated moderate turbulence, and in emulated comparatively
strong turbulence the BER performance suffers power penalties of ~1.6 dB.
It should be noted that a BER of 10-9 is not sufficient for typical card-to-card optical interconnects
and FEC should be employed to improve the BER performance at the cost of some
overhead. Nevertheless, experimental results show that our proposed 3 × 3 10
Gb/s reconfigurable optical interconnects with card-to-card spacing of up
to 30 cm is still achieved even under considerably strong turbulence.
© 2013 IEEE
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