Free-space optics for high-speed reconfigurable card-to-card optical interconnects

High-speed card-to-card optical interconnects are highly demanded in high-performance computing and data centers. Compared with other solutions, free-space optical interconnects have the capability of providing both reconfigurability and flexibility. In this paper we propose and experimentally demonstrate a free-space based reconfigurable optical interconnect architecture and it is capable of connecting cards located both inside the same rack as well as in different racks. Results show that 3xiO Gb/s data transmission is achieved with a worst-case receiver sensitivity better than -9.38 dBm.