Gigabyte/s data communications with the POLO parallel optical link

Abstract

The progress in the development of the 10 channel POLO (Parallel Optical Link Organization) module is described. The POLO program is a consortium of Hewlett-Packard, AMP, Du Pont, SDL, and the University of Southern California to develop low cost, high performance parallel optical data links for computer clusters, multimedia, and switching systems. The design and initial performance of the 1st generation POLO module (POLO-I) have been previously reported. In this paper, we discuss the overall results of the POLO-1 module as well as the design and implementation of the 2nd generation (POLO-2) parallel optical data link.