Development of Optical Printed Circuit Boards

Conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs) cannot provide a sufficient bandwidth to meet the requirement of high transmission speed in future telecommunications and computing systems. At a data rate above a few Gb/s, electrical interconnection in PCBs suffers from severe signal integrity problems, such as crosstalk and transmission loss. The objective of the project is to develop optical PCBs, where all high-speed data is transmitted by optical waveguides or fibers embedded in PCBs. Optical interconnection can support a data rate higher than 10Gb/s and meet the growing demand for bandwidth. Regardless ofmany experimental demonstrations, there have been no commercial optical PCBs, which is due to the lack of a cost-effective process for mass production of optical PCBs. The project focuses on the development of such a process by studying the most promising methods of designing and fabricating optical PCBs. The supporting company Elec & Eltek, one ofthe largest PCB manufacturers in the world, will participate in the study and provide a venue for testing the manufacturing process. The project will lead to prototypes of optical PCBs with potential for mass production, which will benefit the PCB manufacturing industry as well as all other industries that need optical PCBs.