| The ever-increasing demand for bandwidth places a more stringent demand on the interconnections within electronic systems. Free space optical interconnection (FSOI) is a technology that satisfies the bandwidth requirements of newer systems. The development of the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL), which provides high yields and low cost makes FSOI possible. However, the packaging and alignment of opto-electronic components still dominate the manufacturing costs. A solution to the problem of alignment is to use spatial redundancy. One way to accomplish this is by increasing the number of possible optical links and using only a subset of those links to provide a collection of reliable high-speed channels.;This thesis presents the implementation of a transmitter specially developed for a redundant channels alignment FSOI. The implementation consists of a 1.25Gb/s transmitter chip driving one element of a 3 x 3 VCSEL array. The driver chip was designed and fabricated from a commercial 25-Ghz Silicon bipolar process. The design, construction and integration aspects covering the microelectronics, electronics and packaging for the transmitter are summarized. Characterization results are presented for a transmission rate of 1 Gbit/s per channel. |
