A collaboration of
City University of Hong Kong
C & L Holdings Ltd
and Elec & Eltek Multilayer PCB Ltd
The project is supported by Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), HKSAR [Project No. ITS/049/11FP].

Conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs) cannot provide a sufficient bandwidth to meet the requirement of high transmission speed in future telecommunications and computing systems. 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. The project is supported by an Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) with Elec & Eltek (one of the largest PCB manufacturers in the world) as the industrial partner and focuses on the development of optical PCB prototypes with potential for mass production. The outcome of the project will benefit the PCB manufacturing industry as well as all other industries that need optical PCBs.

Uniqueness and Competitive Advantages

• Optical interconnect can overcome the bandwidth bottleneck of electrical interconnect and support a data rate higher than 10 Gb/s.
• Optical PCB can provide an effective way to implement chip-to-chip optical interconnect. The feasibility of the optical PCB technology has been fully demonstrated.
• Fiber-embedded PCBs are most suitable for backplane applications, and waveguide-embedded PCBs can offer more complex on-board signal routing and thus allow more flexible circuit designs.
• Successful development of manufacturable optical PCBs will change not only the PCB industry.

Applications

• High-speed storage devices
• Ultra-high-speed graphic cards
• Telecommuncation devices
• Supercomputers