Introduction

As chips become more complex, interconnects need to be placed more densely on printed circuit boards to carry data in and out of these chips. Copper interconnects, in widespread use today, are quickly approaching their physical limits because of heat and crosstalk problems, thereby threatening to create a bottleneck in system design

These problems can be eliminated with optical interconnects. However, the devices that convert electrical signals on the chip to optical signals for transmission on the interconnect, and re-convert the optical signals to electrical signals at the receiving end, also generate a substantial amount of heat, due to the very high operating speeds of current-day digital electronics. In order for optical interconnects to gain widespread acceptance, a solution must be found to dissipate the heat produced by the devices that generate and process the optical signals.

Benefits:

• Film is deposited in a process commonly used to fabricate thick copper electrical trace
  
• No additional fabrication steps are required (simple and reliable fabrication process)
  
• Manufacturing costs are reduced due to simplified assembly
  Provides an effective heat management scheme
  

Market Potential/Applications: Printed circuit boards that contain chips transferring large (hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes or higher) amounts of data between each other at high frequency (e.g., multi-processor high-end servers used in corporate data centers).

Contact:

University of Texas,
Austin, USA
Website : www.otc.utexas.edu