The Design and Fabrication of Fresnel Phase for Through-Wafer Optical Interconnects.

While the advantages of optical over electrical interconnects for conventional two dimensional VLSI and Wafer-Scale-Integrated (WSI) circuits have not been clearly demonstrated, for three dimensional interconnection structures such as those necessary for stacked wafer and similar architectures, the trade -off between using optical or electrical methods for vertical links is not straightforward. Current work on fabricating a through- wafer optical interconnect within a Hybrid-WSI environment is motivated by the need to obtain experimental data on the overall performance of an optical interconnect so that this trade-off can be clarified in the case of Hybrid-WSI, and in the general case, at least more well defined. This paper details the design fabrication of SIO(2) Fresnel phase plate lens arrays for use in the experimental 1.3micron wavelength through- wafer optical interconnects to be constructed.